Qlik Extensions & Solutions

Our product offerings for Qlik users include:

• Vizlib: Suite of visual and collaboration tools to extend Qlik’s capabilities via writeback tables, input forms, comments, pre-built finance objects, enterprise back-end for security, and much more.
• Fiplana: Qlik-native FP&A system for structured budgeting, top-down and bottom-up planning, automated forecasting, real-time consolidations, and more.
• Write!: Writeback-focused tool that builds on Qlik’s basic native functionality, enhancing planning.

Vizlib Input Form enables business users to enter assumptions, drivers, comments, or other in-line item adjustments directly from Qlik apps. Safe and auditable writeback supports SQL, Oracle, REST, file, and QVD destinations and provides role-based control, locking, and audit trails. Vizlib Teamwork adds in-app commentary and threaded discussions attached to specific insights, facilitating more contextual decision-making.

This depends on the user and the use case, but we typically break these products down into two categories:

• Tableau is easier for beginners: Has a fast ramp-up for users looking for drag-and-drop visuals without a steep learning curve.
• Qlik is better for enterprises: Offers more comprehensive data modeling and exploration for multi-directional analysis, but takes time to learn.

Tableau usually “feels” easier, but often lacks the deeper exploration (especially across multiple business sources) that Qlik can provide. However, even Qlik has limitations that modern businesses struggle with, which is where extensions like Vizlib come in. Vizlib provides no-code visuals, templates, and more to shorten Qlik’s otherwise steep learning curve.

Although Qlik has deeper functionality than Tableau, it also has several major weaknesses that are worth considering:

• Learning Curve: Many users have cited the time it takes to learn Qlik as being a major drawback, with complex interfaces, data-loading scripts, data-model design, and more. This limits the usability for non-technical users (especially without dedicated training).
• Resource-Intensive: When used at scale, Qlik’s in-memory associative engine can use a lot of RAM. The result is that poorly-sized or inefficient models can quickly degrade performance and responsiveness.
• Limited Writeback: While Qlik does have native writeback, it was only introduced recently and has significant limitations. The native writeback lacks adequate governance for many organizations, as well as multi-destination writeback and concurrency controls.
• Licensing Complexity: For smaller businesses and teams, Qlik often ends up being unnecessarily complex and expensive to operate compared to more intuitive tools like Tableau, Logi Symphony, or Spreadsheet Server.

Partly. Basic tasks may be approachable for new users who have prior experience with data visualization tools, but more complex use cases are often not intuitive and result in usage barriers. If you’re considering trying Qlik as a new visualization platform, we recommend planning a short pilot program to see how users adopt and feel about the tool. You could even run this pilot to include Vizlib’s UX enhancements to see if that changes sentiment.

Yes. Qlik can connect to Excel via an Excel add-in for the platform, but this integration is fairly rudimentary and still relies on Excel’s basic templates. You could also connect Qlik to Excel with an extension like Vizlib to enable read/write integration with SQL targets and automated exchanges.

Note: For teams that still rely on spreadsheets for planning, Fiplana makes it easy to move spreadsheet-based FP&A into Qlik while preserving your ability to import/export when needed.

Yes, but the practical reality is that it has very basic functionality and is only relevant for certain use cases (e.g. very simple workflows). For larger organizations with more complex workflows and multi-source data, specialized planning and writeback tools are required. Qlik extensions like Vizlib not only provide this advanced writeback functionality, but also add enhanced data governance, approvals, audit trails, and more. When it comes to real-world planning and collaborative workflows, Qlik’s native writeback just doesn’t cut it for most businesses — Vizlib resolves this by going beyond basic native writeback, enhancing other areas of the Qlik platform in the process.

While Qlik’s associative engine is a powerful foundation for the platform, it keeps data in memory to deliver fast interactive exploration. This architecture causes RAM and CPU to become the primary scaling constraints as your model grows. In other words, teams that have very large row counts can easily hit memory thresholds that cause long reload times, high resource consumption, and other performance issues. Vizlib automatically uses best practices from Qlik to create visual components that are engineered to maintain concurrency for writeback, so UX features don’t cause scalability issues.