Microsoft Power BI vs. Qlik Sense

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Microsoft Power BI
Score 8.5 out of 10
N/A
Microsoft Power BI is a visualization and data discovery tool from Microsoft. It allows users to convert data into visuals and graphics, visually explore and analyze data, collaborate on interactive dashboards and reports, and scale across their organization with built-in governance and security.N/A
Qlik Sense
Score 7.4 out of 10
N/A
Qlik Sense® is a self-service BI platform for data discovery and visualization. It supports a full range of analytics use cases—data governance, pixel-perfect reporting, and collaboration. Its Associative Engine indexes and connects relationships between data points for creating actionable insights.
$200
per month
Pricing
Microsoft Power BIQlik Sense
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
Starter
$200
per month
Standard
$825
per month
Premium
$2,750
per month
Qlik Sense Enterprise on Windows
Contact Sales
Enterprise
Custom Quote
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Microsoft Power BIQlik Sense
Free Trial
YesNo
Free/Freemium Version
YesNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Microsoft Power BIQlik Sense
TrustRadius Insights
Microsoft Power BIQlik Sense
Highlights

TrustRadius
Research Team Insight
Published

Microsoft Power BI and Qlik Sense are both Business Intelligence platforms. They are both prominent names in the BI space, although Microsoft is more well known. However, both Power BI and Sense are newer developments from Microsoft and Qlik, respectively. 

Microsoft Power BI is the giant’s newest BI offering, which focuses on making BI more accessible to smaller organizations in the SMB space as well as enterprises. Qlik Sense, on the other hand, is more focused on delivering data analytics to enterprises. It also has users across company sizes, but is more common in larger organizations. 

Features

Microsoft Power BI and Qlik Sense have different focuses on feature areas that differentiate their ideal use cases.

Power BI is designed to be more accessible and lighter weight for smaller organizations. It also maximizes on benefits from integrating smoothly with other Microsoft products, streamlining data importing and management for companies that already live in the Microsoft ecosystem. This also makes management and training easier for companies that are Microsoft-first. It is also more price-competitive than Qlik Sense. 

However, Qlik Sense brings more enterprise-scale firepower along with the higher price tag. It provides more in-depth enterprise dashboarding and advanced visualizations. These dashboards and visualization are also more customizable than what Power BI can easily allow. Outside of Microsoft-first environments, Qlik Sense is also a leader in collaborative data reporting. 

Limitations

There are also limitations to Microsoft Power BI and Qlik Sense worth considering. 

Power BI’s greater accessibility comes at the cost of more advanced capabilities. For instance, it has more limited advanced visualization capabilities, and more specialized data management and modelling are more difficult, particularly at larger scales. This leads to a lower cap of what can be accomplished with Power BI, and adds a steeper learning curve for midlevel and higher modelling and visualizations. 

On the other hand, Qlik’s higher range of capabilities comes with higher resource costs. For instance, once data is loaded into models any modifications to the data or the model becomes a much more intensive task, which makes Qlik require more active management from users or administrators. It is also not as user-friendly around certain customizations and visual aspects, such as color and font customization. 

Pricing

Microsoft Power BI offers two pricing packages. Power BI Pro is a self-service BI offering managed by Microsoft, which costs $9.99/user/month. The Power BI Premium adds more big data analytics, cloud and on-premises reporting, and unlimited users. Premium costs $4,995/month per resource. 

Qlik Sense also offers two pricing packages. Qlik Sense Business, at $30/user/month, offers the core Qlik Sense platform and can be trialed for free for 30 days. Qlik Sense Enterprise SaaS, priced at $70/Professional/month, $40/Analyzer/month, or $100/Analyzer Capacity/month, adds additional governance capabilities, managed spaces, and multiple user types. 

Features
Microsoft Power BIQlik Sense
BI Standard Reporting
Comparison of BI Standard Reporting features of Product A and Product B
Microsoft Power BI
8.8
Ratings
8% above category average
Qlik Sense
8.5
Ratings
4% above category average
Pixel Perfect reports8.50 Ratings8.30 Ratings
Customizable dashboards10.00 Ratings8.90 Ratings
Report Formatting Templates8.00 Ratings8.20 Ratings
Ad-hoc Reporting
Comparison of Ad-hoc Reporting features of Product A and Product B
Microsoft Power BI
8.2
Ratings
2% above category average
Qlik Sense
8.6
Ratings
7% above category average
Drill-down analysis7.00 Ratings8.90 Ratings
Formatting capabilities9.00 Ratings8.20 Ratings
Integration with R or other statistical packages8.00 Ratings8.40 Ratings
Report sharing and collaboration9.00 Ratings9.00 Ratings
Report Output and Scheduling
Comparison of Report Output and Scheduling features of Product A and Product B
Microsoft Power BI
8.6
Ratings
4% above category average
Qlik Sense
8.8
Ratings
6% above category average
Publish to Web8.00 Ratings8.80 Ratings
Publish to PDF9.00 Ratings8.80 Ratings
Report Versioning9.00 Ratings8.80 Ratings
Report Delivery Scheduling8.00 Ratings8.80 Ratings
Delivery to Remote Servers9.00 Ratings8.80 Ratings
Data Discovery and Visualization
Comparison of Data Discovery and Visualization features of Product A and Product B
Microsoft Power BI
8.7
Ratings
9% above category average
Qlik Sense
8.7
Ratings
9% above category average
Pre-built visualization formats (heatmaps, scatter plots etc.)9.00 Ratings8.50 Ratings
Location Analytics / Geographic Visualization8.00 Ratings8.80 Ratings
Predictive Analytics9.00 Ratings8.70 Ratings
Pattern Recognition and Data Mining9.00 Ratings00 Ratings
Access Control and Security
Comparison of Access Control and Security features of Product A and Product B
Microsoft Power BI
8.6
Ratings
1% above category average
Qlik Sense
9.0
Ratings
6% above category average
Multi-User Support (named login)9.00 Ratings9.20 Ratings
Role-Based Security Model9.00 Ratings9.00 Ratings
Multiple Access Permission Levels (Create, Read, Delete)10.00 Ratings8.80 Ratings
Report-Level Access Control7.00 Ratings00 Ratings
Single Sign-On (SSO)8.30 Ratings8.90 Ratings
Mobile Capabilities
Comparison of Mobile Capabilities features of Product A and Product B
Microsoft Power BI
8.0
Ratings
2% above category average
Qlik Sense
7.4
Ratings
6% below category average
Responsive Design for Web Access8.00 Ratings8.30 Ratings
Mobile Application7.70 Ratings8.20 Ratings
Dashboard / Report / Visualization Interactivity on Mobile7.70 Ratings8.20 Ratings
Application Program Interfaces (APIs) / Embedding
Comparison of Application Program Interfaces (APIs) / Embedding features of Product A and Product B
Microsoft Power BI
8.4
Ratings
7% above category average
Qlik Sense
8.6
Ratings
10% above category average
REST API8.00 Ratings8.80 Ratings
Javascript API9.90 Ratings8.40 Ratings
iFrames8.00 Ratings8.50 Ratings
Java API8.00 Ratings8.60 Ratings
Themeable User Interface (UI)8.10 Ratings8.60 Ratings
Customizable Platform (Open Source)8.40 Ratings8.40 Ratings
User Ratings
Microsoft Power BIQlik Sense
Likelihood to Recommend
8.5
(0 ratings)
8.5
(0 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
9.0
(0 ratings)
8.4
(0 ratings)
Usability
8.0
(0 ratings)
8.0
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
10.0
(0 ratings)
7.3
(0 ratings)
In-Person Training
-
(0 ratings)
9.1
(0 ratings)
Online Training
-
(0 ratings)
9.1
(0 ratings)
Implementation Rating
9.0
(0 ratings)
7.3
(0 ratings)
Vendor post-sale
-
(0 ratings)
9.1
(0 ratings)
Vendor pre-sale
-
(0 ratings)
9.1
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
Microsoft Power BIQlik Sense
Likelihood to Recommend
Microsoft Power BI is great for sales tracking, financial reporting, and real-time operations monitoring. It integrates data from multiple sources, creating interactive dashboards for better decision-making. However, it's less ideal for real-time big data processing, offline access, or when deep customization is needed. It works best for structured reporting but struggles with highly complex data models.
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Qlik Sense is a program whose purpose is to greatly improve all your operations and use of all data in an organic way. The mission will always be to increase the economic and commercial processes of the company in a short time. I recommended it for its high technology, which was Created for this area, the results are successful. We have noticed how it has increased relationships with our clients thanks to the credibility and security that we provide.
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Pros
  • It is great at taking in large amounts of data and housing it all.
  • Microsoft Power BI is so user friendly and it's dashboards are very easy on the eye.
  • The ease of sharing dashboards makes it great for use across a large company.
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  • Self-Service Visualization and Discovery
  • Fullstack BI from ETL to Visualization, its built-in ETL engine can transform disparate data sets into a common data structure
  • Uses HTML5 based responsive design which visualization automatically adapt to the screen size and orientation of the users device
  • Actively engaged community and resources to help you learn this software in the best possible manner
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Cons
  • It would be easier for users could Microsoft Power BI and Excel used the same programming languages.
  • Would like to see the online version of Microsoft Power BI be as powerful as the desktop version.
  • Publishing a Microsoft Power BI file online and then having to save the file is somewhat redundant.
  • Would like to export each page or chart as an image.
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  • Not a lot of room for customization as we were used to in QlikView
  • UI and default navigation can be very clunky and not user friendly
  • Although the backend is fantastic, the front end experience leaves a lot to be desired. As a developer you don't have a lot of options to customized your app unless you turn to Javascript, CSS and HTML. This is not a common stack you would find in most BI developers
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Likelihood to Renew
Microsoft Power BI is an excellent and scalable tool. It has a learning curve, but once you get past that, the sky is the limit and you can build from the most simple to the most complex dashboards. I have built everything from simple reports with only a few data points to complex reports with many pages and advanced filtering.
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Qlik Sense is a constantly improving it's software and working with its' users to make it better. They are great at keeping their users informed of progress and care about delivering a quality product
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Usability
Takes a little bit to get used to it. Not natively intuitive but fairly straight forward to pick up. Also docking it a few points because you can create a really clean, simple UI in Claude very quickly that's faster than building all of this yourself in Microsoft Power BI.
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Qlik Sense has a better and easy to learn user interface compared with other analytics tool which always help us to create regular and adhoc reports within the stipulated time frame and can be easily refreshed at a scheduled time and sent to multiple stakeholders for timely update regarding the Key metrics indicator.
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Support Rating
It is a fantastic tool, you can do almost everything related with data and reports, it is a perfect substitutive of Power Point and Excel with a high evolution and flexibility, and also it is very friendly and easy to share. I think all companies should have Power BI (or other BI tool) in their software package and if they are in the MS Suite, for sure Power BI should be the one due to all the benefits of the MS ecosystem.
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Not only can you ask the support team for help, but you can also ask the community. Also with the community there is a vast amount of problems that have already been solved. The problem you are encountering has a likely chance of already being discussed and even solved in the community section saving you time from reaching out.
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In-Person Training
No answers on this topic
The instructor was very knowledgeable.
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Online Training
No answers on this topic
The online instructor was very knowledgeable.
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Implementation Rating
It was integrated with our erp easily and was accessible on cloud.
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Hire Qlik consultants. It's better done by them or with their aid.
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Alternatives Considered
All others apps are enablers and Microsoft Power BI is the visual that end user sees which often adds more value to the end user to make strategic decisions from this. All are equally great but Microsoft Power BI is the end result
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The customization of the platform opens up plenty of other options depending on the use cases. The API layer is incredibly rich and makes integration of Qlik based visualization into web pages a simple and effective pattern. It's been very easy to use with a great community made up of professionals. Qlik Sense has introduces artificial Intelligence into my data visualization and reporting activity.
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Return on Investment
  • We're still early in the adoption process at this company, but we've illustrated how bad data keeps us from being more productive. ~25% of a team's work week was dedicated to effectively cleaning up entries, but it was always seen as a normal to them.
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  • The impact has undoubtedly been positive, it is difficult to quantify it, however in terms of effectiveness or efficiency I give it a 90%.
  • I don't give it 100% because to use the complete package you have to pay, and it's not that cheap and on the other hand because it has some deficiencies, such as technical support and some issues like windows that are not so friendly and easy to work with.
  • Still, I can't stop using it.
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ScreenShots

Microsoft Power BI Screenshots

Screenshot of Microsoft Power BI - Turns insights into impact for business usersScreenshot of Power BI integrates easily with Microsoft 365Screenshot of Microsoft Power BI - AI-Powered CapabilitiesScreenshot of Microsoft Power BI - Copilot can be used to create reportsScreenshot of Microsoft Power BI - Data HubScreenshot of Microsoft Power BI - Scales as organizational needs grow

Qlik Sense Screenshots

Screenshot of Qlik Sense Cash Flow DashboardScreenshot of Qlik Sense Global Smart SearchScreenshot of Qlik Sense Smart Data Compression - Get immediate insight on large dataScreenshot of Extend, mix and mash-up with our APIsScreenshot of Add "External data" with Qlik DataMarket - Data as a ServiceScreenshot of Visualization Bundle