Companies are realizing the power and value of business intelligence, which allows them to respond quickly to customer preferences and market changes. Among the most widely used and trusted BI and analytics platforms are Zoho Analytics and Qlik Sense. In this article, we discuss and compare Zoho Analytics and Qlik Sense software.
What is Zoho Analytics?
Zoho Analytics is a self-service BI and analytics software for creating dashboards and analyzing data. It is available both on the cloud and on-premises and helps provide valuable insights from business data of small to large organizations. Zoho Analytics allows visual analysis of business data and can be used across several functional fields by a wide range of users.
The Zoho Analytics platform provides a complete picture of the team’s progress with informative dashboards. Users can also create a slew of reports, such as hours used, resource utilization charts, project status and planned vs. actual data.
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The latest release, Zoho Analytics 5.0, has a rich feature set, including unified business insights, Zoho DataPrep, data storytelling, deep augmented capabilities like Zia insights and Conversational BI and 60+ updates. It also offers access controls/permissions, activity dashboard, ad hoc query and reporting, application development, collaboration tools, customizable dashboards and reports, and data connectors, along with many other features.
What is Qlik Sense?
Qlik Sense is a world-class BI software that enables users of all skill levels to create and share powerful, interactive dashboards in a governable environment. The solution uses AI, combined with a powerful analytics engine, to help businesses make data-driven, actionable decisions.
Qlik Sense uses associative technology to allow fast calculations, at scale and in context. It delivers many essential services on even the most complex use cases within a single cloud platform, including self-service visualization, interactive dashboards, alerting & action, reporting, mobility, custom & embedded and advanced analytics. Its feature set offers access controls/permissions, activity dashboard, ad hoc query and reporting, API, benchmarking, collaboration tools, contextual search, customizable dashboards, reports, and templates, and data connectors, among other features.
Zoho Analytics vs. Qlik Sense features comparison
BI solutions are a vital tool in achieving the operational efficiency and agility that organizations require. Although Zoho Analytics and Qlik Sense both are trusted BI solutions, there are some differences in their services and performance.
| Zoho Analytics | Qlik Sense | |
|---|---|---|
| Automatic data blending | Supported | Not supported |
| Benchmarking | Not supported | Supported |
| AI-powered automation, contextual insights and narration | Supported | Not supported |
| Strategic planning | Not supported | Supported |
| Prebuilt business analytics | Supported | Very limited — available in Enterprise edition |
| Automatic data sync | Supported | Not supported |
| Smart alerts | Supported | Limited — available in Enterprise edition only |
| Historical snapshotting | Supported | Not supported |
| Supported operating systems | Windows PC, Android, OS iPhone/iPad/Mac, Linux | Windows PC, Android, OS iPhone/iPad/Mac |
Reporting and visualizations
The mark of a great BI system is the accessibility, power and customization of its reporting tools. Zoho Analytics offers a variety of prebuilt reporting widgets that help business users quickly build visualizations and analyze data. The drag-and-drop builder helps users build custom reports where viewers can drill-down into data for more information.
Qlik Sense also offers a self-service visualization tool that gives business and data science users control over the context of the data. These tools allow filtering, interactive and real-time updating and the addition of Insight Analytics AI tools help users with their analysis.
Ability to connect data sources
BI solutions should be able to combine data from companies’ ERP, CRM and financial systems, as well as from external sources, like third-party applications. Zoho Analytics offers a tool called Unified Business Analytics, which includes native data connections to many SaaS and third-party apps across business units like HR, marketing, and finance. Zoho Analytics also has pre-built reporting templates with sample KPIs and key metrics your team is likely to use for each of its native connections.
Qlik Sense offers data connections to your internal files, databases, enterprise applications and SaaS tools from across the company. The software has existing connections to hundreds of business apps, and features data ingestion via ODBC, Restful API or a web connection, depending on the type of data or endpoint. There are also choices in how you view and use your data: Choose to build your visualizations in Qlik Sense or publish them via custom applications.
Embedded analytics
Embedded analytics give companies the ability to white label their BI tool and use it in custom customer-facing apps, websites and internal tools. Zoho Analytics combines the power of Zia, the Zoho AI assistant that translates natural language questions to help business users discover data with the low or no-code architecture for easy implementation. Building and embedding the BI tools within custom software can be done through a single sign-on API or SAML authentication.
Qlik Sense’s embedded analytics tools rely on an Associative Engine to draw connections between related data from across every different data source, without direct querying. This means that behind the scenes, the embedded analytics tool will draw connections for customers who need less data knowledge to work with a wider range of data than with query-based tools.
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Choosing Qlik Sense vs Zoho Analytics
Qlik Sense and Zoho Analytics are comparable tools that provide AI-powered business intelligence capabilities from data ingestion through embedded analytics.
Zoho Analytics has the power of the Zoho multi-tool platform behind it, which makes it an ideal choice for customers who are already heavily invested in Zoho’s tools. It can manage connections from many other apps and data sources as well, but those native integrations will work the easiest.
Qlik Sense is built for users of all types, but because of Qlik’s extensive product set as a cloud data integration and analytics platform, its everyday user base will consist largely of data scientists who prepare data and built reports for business users to explore.
For more comparisons of BI solutions, check out these TechRepublic articles: Power BI vs. Tableau, Power BI vs. Zoho Analytics, SAP BusinessObjects vs. Oracle BI, Tableau vs. Databox: BI tool comparison, Domo BI vs. Dundas BI: Software comparison and top Power BI alternatives.