Qlik Sense, PowerBi, Tableau – Apples for Apples?

 

I read a lot of posts where people look to compare these 3 pieces of analytics software and overwhelmingly I see people try and position them as one is better than the other, mostly the through the age-old sales tactic of FUD (fear, uncertainty and doubt).

Having been in the field of analytics sales for coming up to 8 years (admittedly all Qlik) , I do get this, though there isn’t an objective view of which one to decide on. What I’d like to do here, is speak about the other things that don’t come to the fore in these comparisons are made by others that don’t know what makes Qlik diferent.

For me it comes down to this:

Do you want to see what has happened with your business/organisation? In other words, are you looking for a quick/easy way to visualise your data that would otherwise be represented in excel? Or, are you looking to find out why things have happened?

In my opinion, Qlik Sense, PowerBi and Tableau do the first thing very well, though it’s only Qlik that allows you to take that next step and answer the why questions.

How does Qlik enable you to do this?

Qlik’s Associative experience

The unique thing about Qlik Sense, is the “Associative Experience” or the green (your selection), white (everything associated to your selection) and grey (everything not associated to your selection) which is highlighting that appears when you make selections. This not only allows you to see what is related to your selections, it also allows you to see what isn’t.

Why is this important? Well, there are incredible examples of data that should have been associated but wasn’t. For example, during a proof of concept a utilities company was looking to visualise their managed debt. The associative experience showed that there was a huge amount of the debt that was unmanaged (it was grey). The total amount came to 10’s of millions. There are mountains of examples like this.

The way the associative experience works means that all of your data, in that particular application, is linked.

Nothing is left behind when you make selections.

This also means that if you have other questions, you can carry on asking and answering them.

PowerBi and Tableau are very like excel, in that you have to pretty much understand what questions the user will have, when you create a dashboard. If excel has been frowned on for this very limitation, then why would you want to just do the same but with some very nice graphics?

Qlik has come up with an excellent demo of the Associative Experience in action, I did try to embed it right here, but the restrictions of WordPress mean that it doesn’t work properly. I’ll leave the link at the bottom so you can jump to the page and try it out.

Colour blindness (Yeah, this one surprised me too)

Worldwide, there are approximately 300 million people with colour blindness, almost the same number of people as the entire population of the USA!

In the UK there are approximately 3 million colour blind people (about 4.5% of the entire population).

The Green, White and Grey Associative Experience in Qlik has been consciously developed with colour blindness in mind. 

Green, White, and Grey are some of the few colours that people with colour blindness can differentiate between, when they are on the same page.

BBC Sport in fact posted an excellent article about the impact of colourblindness on people watching sports. Colour blindness in football: Kit clashes and fan struggles – what is being done?

Build once, deploy anywhere

Qlik Sense is mobile enable “right out of the box”, and Qlik Sense was developed using the ethos of “build once, deploy anywhere.” Which means you don’t have to consider the different screen sizes when you are developing. This is responsive design.

Additionally, Qlik Sense is delivered entirely in your HTML 5 browser, so you don’t need separate clients for the different operating systems you have. Qlik Sense will work in Chrome, Safari, Firefox, etc. Be that on your desktop, laptop, tablet or mobile phone.

You can also install a specific Qlik Sense app on your Apple or Android phone, which would allow you to connect to the server, download the data/app and then work offline.

How much does the app cost?

Nothing.

Storytelling

There’s been a lot said about the value of storytelling with your data. Within Qlik Sense, you can create stories from your data, by taking snapshots, adding commentaries and highlighting salient data points.This is unique, though it does go even further. I use Qlik Sense (a lot) in Sales meetings, and when data is presented in any meeting, there’s always the chance that someone will question it. That then usually goes one of two ways. The meeting gets sidetracked into a discussion on if the data is right, or, it gets moved to, the well used (but rarely followed up), “We’ll take that offline” list of things that may or may not be addressed after the meeting finishes. When this happens, I simply right Qlik click (apologies it’s ingrained in me) on the snapshot, and go back into the QLik Sense application with all the selections, that were made when the snapshot was taken. We can then come to an agreement quickly, and move on. It’s saved me an enormous amount of time, and kept meetings on track.

Moving away from the business benefits:

Governance

There are a couple of layers of governance in Qlik Sense:

i) Security down to the row/cell to make sure that only those you want can see the data. This also applies geographically. ie. If you create a Qlik Sense application for a global sales team, then you can ensure that each salesperson only sees the data for them, or their team. Sales Managers can see their team, and the figures for other teams, Sales Directors get a higher level and so it goes on.

ii) Governed libraries. The central tenet around self-service, for me. I’ll go into what I believe self-service is in another post. Governed libraries enables the BI team to develop and curate a library of dimensions and measures, that are reusable. Not only does this enable self-service, at all levels, it also ensures that everyone is using the same calculations for their measures. 

I once spoke with a company that had 15 different definitions of FTE (Full Time Employee/Equivalent), and they could not report accurately on this vital measure. A governed library gave them a single definition, and trust in what was being reported.Ultimately a governed library creates agility and trust in your data. The much sought after Single Version of the Truth.

In memory (Qlik) vs query-based (Tableau and PowerBI)

Another difference is that Qlik also utilises an in-memory architecture.

Why does this matter?  That comes down to something that’s missed from most project scopes, and that’s acceptable performance.

In the words of Michael Distler in his blog post last year:

Even when moving BI processing to the data lake, a SQL-based query tool must cache/aggregate SQL-based views to have any chance of achieving acceptable performance. And since they are only caching some of the data, one needs to guess what questions a user may ask. Go beyond these pre-defined boundaries and the user is faced with waiting while the BI tool undertakes the slow process of a new query against a massive repository. And even more time-consuming would be using SQL-based queries to uncover the unexpected non-related or missing data. With the democratization of data and more business users being called on to use analytics in their daily tasks – making people wait even longer is plainly unacceptable.

The Whole Big Story – Michael Distler 

In memory enables the performance a user is seeking for when they are looking for answers, from the data. In memory brings the speed that’s associated with agility, not the waiting while the query is executed. This is one of the areas that others try and subject the FUD (Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt) I mentioned earlier. The fact remains that if this was an issue, then some very large companies wouldn’t have rolled Qlik out to 1000’s of users.

You can also run the Qlik Associative Engine at source by using the Qlik Associative Big Data Index which gives the same performance against data sources of immense size.

Lastly (though I could go one, and on about what makes Qlik Sense unique), 

Speed and scale

I’ve spoken about the speed for the user, Qlik is also incredibly quick to implement. The majority of any time in a Qlik Sense project is (and should be) devoted to building the data model. Once this is done, you are set.

Though it’s impossible to predict exactly how long any implementation will take (be it Qlik Sense, Tableau or PowerBi), most organisations start with their developer team of 1 to 3 people, and then roll out when they’ve developed the applications or dashboards. Typically the first Qlik Sense app is developed in the first couple of days.

I worked on a tender for a public sector organisation last year, which was for 1000’s of users, and we estimated that bringing all the data together, creating the data models and first Qlik Sense applications would take 3 months. Sadly we didn’t win the bid, due to the buying authority having some bizarre objections about what was in our cloud, which is by the by. The project went to another organisation using PowerBI. Last I heard, 4 months into the project, they were having massive issues just scaling PowerBi to the number of users. Qlik Sense scales linearly. So each server you add, will support exactly the same number of users (let’s say server 1 = 350 users, Server 2 = another 350 users) whereas others don’t scale in this linear way.

A customer once made a comparison between Qlik and Tableau, which I think I pretty telling

What I can do in a day in Tableau, I can’t do in Qlik.

What I can do in 2 days in Qlik, I can’t do in Tableau.

Ultimately it’s down to what you want. Something that puts pictures on what would normally be a spreadsheet, or a solution that enables to ask (and answer) a stream of questions, and also lets you get to the why answers.

If you’d like to have a look at the Associative Experience demo I mentioned, here’s the link: Qlik Associative difference demo page

Thanks for sticking with this to the end, and I do hope this has been informative. I’d love to hear your comments below.