No more typing reviews! Try our Samantha, our new voice AI agent.

ELK Kibana vs Qlik Sense comparison

Why PeerSpot?
 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

ELK Kibana
Average Rating
7.2
Number of Reviews
4
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Qlik Sense
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.2
Number of Reviews
126
Ranking in other categories
Data Visualization (6th), Embedded BI (4th), AI Data Analysis (15th)
 

Featured Reviews

KJ
Engineer at Raytheon Technologies
Visualization tools are optimized providing us with increased flexibility
One area that could be improved is security. Being an open source product, if you want to add security, if you want to add authentication, you've got to use a third party plugin that may or may not cost you, or alternatively upgrade to their subscription service, which is a downside as well. I think the types of visualizations are nice, but I think there's room to add more without having to go to third party plugins to do that. Just comparing the total number of visualizations that it provides compared to Grafana, you can see that it's lacking. The UI experience isn't as rich as it is with Grafana or certain other tools. I would like to see better authentication options, typical authentication options, like active directory and LDAP as well, just a richer UI with more graph type options.
Saranya Deepthi - PeerSpot reviewer
Project Engineer at Wipro
Improved AI-driven dashboards have accelerated decisions but still need better visuals and faster refresh
Absolutely, nothing is entirely positive, and everything has both advantages and disadvantages. When I worked with Qlik Sense, circular charts were not available, which meant I had to look for alternative solutions that would be reliable or make the functionality work. There are some features that need to be added. Additionally, there is a limit to the number of fields that can be added in Qlik Sense, and I believe it would be beneficial if they increased the count for fields and columns. There might be requirements where an Excel file contains many columns that need to be displayed as visual representations to clients, and in those situations, it becomes very difficult and I have to use alternative approaches. When this problem arose, I used HTML code to write a solution and make it work. Qlik Sense should avoid these types of limitations in future updates. Another issue is page resolution. If a client wants to view the dashboard on a single page without scrolling, bar charts appear small and the values in KPIs, bar charts, scatter plots, and line graphs cannot be seen very clearly. Adding more extensions to make the job easier would also be beneficial. Improvements to reporting would be helpful as well, because working with large datasets makes reporting very difficult. Additionally, when data is refreshed, it cannot be completed in a short timeframe. Refreshing very large datasets can take one, two, or even three hours, so reducing the refresh time would be very useful for customers.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"Having a tool where you can find logs that were generated months ago, and being able to search over a long period of time, is great."
"The user interface is very good, and the data visualization is simple and user-friendly."
"The stability of this solution is fantastic, as it has not failed us for months and we use it extensively."
"The automatic update of the graphs from a dashboard is very convenient."
"The optimization and flexibility of visualization tools."
"Some visualization tools are optimized for time series like Kibana, which allows you to do both, and we like the flexibility of being able to analyze different types of data."
"The reports are better looking than in QlikView."
"Provides self-service capabilities for inexperienced users using the free desktop version."
"The associative searching and filtering capability is a unique feature among other BI tools, and one does not need to deeply understand the underlying data."
"Qlik has brought tremendous value to our organization in a few key ways."
"The most valuable feature is flexibility."
"By using Qlik and filling a dashboard on top of it, our ability to analyze and identify our strengths and weaknesses has improved."
"It's an easy-to-use, fun visualization tool; probably best suited for prototyping."
"You can appreciate major ROI within three months."
 

Cons

"Security could be improved thereby avoiding the necessity of a third party plugin."
"Populating data sometimes is also difficult for the user."
"One area that could be improved is security. Being an open source product, if you want to add security, if you want to add authentication, you've got to use a third party plugin that may or may not cost you, or alternatively upgrade to their subscription service, which is a downside as well."
"Having a kind of wizard that would help you when you are typing your search would make it easier and quicker to refine your search, and ultimately find what you are looking for."
"This solution should allow the user to combine two indices into one graph and it should provide a unique count."
"More visualizations Automated report delivery Cross app data sharing Easy app sharing options with specific users."
"Additionally, there is a limit to the number of fields that can be added in Qlik Sense, and I believe it would be beneficial if they increased the count for fields and columns."
"They need to make security rules to access applications and data security easier and customizable."
"It is easy to scale and buy a license, however, the solution is very memory intensive. More users and more data can lead to degraded performance and longer processing times to run reports."
"The "vanilla" Qlik Sense tool is limited in some areas."
"Technical support is poor: We definitely use community support."
"A valuable improvement for this solution would be the enabling of us to host dashboards for our customers."
"Needs more bookmarking and a data load screen."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

Information not available
"Licensing can start to get expensive, but compared to other tools in this space it is about average."
"The costs can initially become quite high. Make sure you have a clear understanding of who will truly use the product as opposed to someone that will simply receive the end report."
"For personal use, the desktop version of Qlik Sense is absolutely free, and you can share visualizations with others and to a personal cloud space, though limited with storage space."
"The new licensing model is much better."
"We have 20 licenses for Qlik Sense, and it is a special license that allows people in the whole company to use it over time. You buy this license and there are some minutes that can be used. For example, for the users that used only a few minutes in a month, we use this license. All the people have the ability to work with Qlik Sense. However, the number of licenses is not the number of users. The number of users that uses Qlik Sense is approximately 35 people."
"It is a little expensive for the Italian market. Normally, Qlik Sense has two types and costs. The medium cost is around 700 euros per year."
"Licensing could be cheaper."
"I believe pricing is similar to other products in the same category, if you have it on-premise."
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Data Visualization solutions are best for your needs.
917,433 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
No data available
Financial Services Firm
18%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Construction Company
9%
Outsourcing Company
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business34
Midsize Enterprise40
Large Enterprise89
 

Questions from the Community

Ask a question
Earn 20 points
Seeking lightweight open source BI software
It depends on the Data architecture and the complexity of your requirement. Some great tools in the market are Qlik Sense, Power BI, OBIEE, Tableau, etc. I have recently started using Cognos Enter...
Seeking lightweight open source BI software
There are many...It would rather depend what System BI architecture or Enterprise legacy you have at your end...I would recommend as follows: 1) If you have legacies of SAP, Oracle - look for SAP...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Qlik Sense?
It is not about performance. It is just about how expensive it is to implement.
 

Also Known As

No data available
QlikSense, Qlik Analytics Platform
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Sprint, Grab, Volkswagen, Autopilot, Voyages-SNCF.com, Just Eat, Accenture, Dell, Verizon Wireless, Kaidee, Green Man Gaming, Compare Group, Tango, Quizlet
Abbvie, Airbus, Barclays, BT Openreach, BMW, Daimler AG, HSBC, IKEA, Nationwide Building Society, Royal Mail Group, Sanofi, Siemens, Wendy'', Vodafone, Volvo
Find out what your peers are saying about Salesforce, Splunk, SAP and others in Data Visualization. Updated: October 2026.
917,433 professionals have used our research since 2012.