"Major categories" depends on what your needs are, so can't really help you there.
Ease of use - for developers? For power users (people who create their own analytics)? For regular users (people who consume pre-made analytics)? What are you trying to achieve? It's a lot easier to build a chart based on complex expressions in QlikView than it is in QlikSense, but it's a lot harder for a user to create their own basic chart and make it look good.
Ultimately, the question you should ask yourself isn't "What basic things does each tool do?" - it should be "What are my business needs, and which tools are best fit to meet them?" Do you plan on extensive use on mobile devices? Do you have complicated data security concerns? Do you have concrete, well-defined business areas or a spaghetti mess of combined areas? All of these issues, and many more, are better-handled in some tools, and not as well handled (if at all) in others.
If your primary goal is pre-made analytics, I would recommend QlikView (though the lack of clear road map for it is a major concern) over SAS and Spotfire. If your primary goal is self-service, I would likely rank Tableau ahead of the others, with Spotfire second and QlikSense third. Possibly not a popular opinion given that this is a Qlik site, and keep in mind I haven't thoroughly tested every software recently.
