Why has Visualization Innovation slowed down compared to other product areas?
Qlik Team and Community,
over the past 6 months, I’ve noticed significantly more visible innovation and improvements in areas like data integration, governance, automation, and platform capabilities which is great and clearly strategic.
However, when it comes to visualization features and frontend capabilities, the pace of innovation seems noticeably slower.
As someone working daily with Qlik on premise for analytics and dashboard development, I’m curious:
Is visualization currently less of a strategic focus?
Are there major improvements planned but not yet visible?
Is the assumption that the visualization layer is already “mature enough”?
From a practitioner perspective, there is still strong demand for flexiblity in the visual components and improved customization possibilities without the use of extensions.
Qlik has always been strong in associative analytics and engine capabilities.
But in competitive scenarios, visualization flexibility is a important factor too.
I’d really appreciate some transparency on the roadmap or strategic direction regarding visualization.
Because when looking at Qlik Ideation, there are many visualization-related ideas that have been in “Collecting Feedback” status for months, some with 100+ upvotes Like “Combo Chart with one more dimension”. A frequently requested enhancement, yet I could not find it reflected on the roadmap.
Looking forward to hearing thoughts from both the community and the Qlik product team.
As I'm compiling my slide deck for this years Qlik Connect I would say we managed to push a fair amount of new features also this year. I recommend to subscribe to the change log , Analytics - Visualizations & Dashboarding to keep track, new features drop in Qlik Cloud on a weekly basis.
App and sheet
Show all in asset panel – Jun 19th 2025
Data filters & table in edit – June 9th 2025
Download shortcut (cloud only) – May 20th 2025
Filter pane drawer icon – Aug 19th 2025
Publish by drag and drop – Oct 9th 2025
CSS input in sheet properties – Sep 2nd 2025
Sheet thumbnails (cloud only) – Nov 11th 2025
Don’t show me again – Nov 4th 2025
Re org chart section – Nov 25th 2025
Sheet templates (cloud only) – Dec 2nd 2025
Resize property panel – Dec 9th 2025
Bookmark grouping (cloud only) – Feb 5th 2026
Add field to selection bar – Feb 10th 2026
Combo
Combo chart area layers – Nov 6th 2025
Show hide in Combo – Nov 25th 2025
Shapes
Labels in shapes – May 27th 2025
Bar chart shapes – Oct 7th 2025
Combo chart shapes – Oct 7th 2025
Scatter plot shapes – Oct 7th 2025
Images in shapes – Oct 16th 2025
Direct Query (cloud only)
Direct Query layout objects– Oct 9th 2025
All charts in DV in Direct Query – Nov 4th 2025
Straight table
Sort & search header actions – Dec 2nd 2025
Move columns drag and drop – Feb 1st 2026
Move columns drag and drop – Feb 3rd 2026
More
Pivot table Indicators – June 5th 2025
Table in native charts – Jun 19th 2025
Highlight field in table – Sept 8th 2025
Org chart styling & images – May 30th 2025
Bar width continuous axis – Nov 25th 2025
However resources are always scarce and there are many other areas that are competing for attention. As PM for Data Visualization I ofc also want to see my area as the top priority. We will definitely continue our investments, we see opportunities for improvement in many places.
As an individual end user your specific issue might be addressed as fast as you wish, we need to maximize for the whole customer base.
One possible reason could be that Qlik Sense’s embedding and extension capabilities are quite mature and developer friendly compared to many other BI platforms. Since extensions are widely available (free, paid, and open-source). teams don’t always have to wait for product updates or new features. They can quickly implement custom requirements using extensions and embedding options, which gives a lot of flexibility and faster turnaround.
Regards, Vighnesh Gawad Connect with me on LinkedIn | GitHub
There are definitely valuable additions in there. Features like Shapes and the enhancements to Combo Charts are great steps forward and show that visualization capabilities are evolving. Some of the usability improvements are also very helpful in day-to-day work.
My point was less about whether improvements are happening, they clearly are. It is more about the perceived balance between smaller usability enhancements and larger, structural visualization capabilities that many users have been requesting for a long time. From a community perspective, it can sometimes feel unclear how prioritization decisions are made, especially when highly voted ideas remain open for years.
I absolutely understand that resources are limited and that prioritization must consider the entire customer base. My intention was simply to share how this looks from an engaged end-user perspective who likes to design Dashboards with Qlik.
I understand that you don't have full control over the process or what gets prioritized so please don't take this as targeted at you personally but I would like to voice some frustration with the ideation process in general.
1. There doesn't seem to be much engagement from qlik to the users on the ideation page. For example we can see the status change to "collecting feedback" or "on roadmap" but I don't usually see Qlik commenting or asking questions to 'collect feedback' or giving a rough estimate of where on the roadmap an idea is. Many ideas seem stuck in whatever status they were in prior to the migration to the new ideation page which creates confusion on where certain ideas are actually at in the approval/development process.
2. I wonder how many users from Qlik Community are even aware of the new ideation page and how to access it. It doesn't seem to get as much activity as the previous ideation page that was hosted on Qlik Community. The Qlik community version of the ideation page seemed to facilitate more discussion and engagement.
3. The new ideation page lets me see ideas I have liked but I don't see a way to sort on most liked by other users like I used to be able to do with the previous Qlik Community idea page.
