Re:Ask HN: Anything better than Tableau for data viz, dashbo...
by bmh100 on Friday October 02, 2015 @03:52PM
(#10320878)
I have deep experience in the QlikView (QV) platform, so I can address some of the points in your experience:
> expensive
QV is not free, that's for sure. You'll be spending tens of thousands of dollars for the one-time license fee, as well 20% yearly maintenance. On the other hand, you'll be saving thousands of hours of engineering effort by not reinventing the hundreds of wheels already in the platform. Don't succumb to "not invented here" syndrome.
Check out a few dashboards I designed in just a day total [1], or the vendors demos of Twitter data [2], HealthData.gov data [3], or Salesforce.com data [4].
> ugly
If you are a first time user, the default visualizations are ugly, no doubt. But for someone with design skill, the visualizations can be made quite beautiful. For wanting more tools, just add your favorite JS library and HTML to make a custom visualization.
> completely lacking in statistical tools
Fortunately, QV can link with R, allowing you to all the advanced capabilities you need. Need something more specific? Throw a microservice REST API on top of your desired application, and load that in through a GET request. There are Hadoop connectors also built in.
One thing that people often don't realize when comparing Tableau and QV, is that QV is a platform, as opposed to Tableau being just a visualization tool. QV includes ETL, task scheduling, and an in-memory analytics database.
> expensive
QV is not free, that's for sure. You'll be spending tens of thousands of dollars for the one-time license fee, as well 20% yearly maintenance. On the other hand, you'll be saving thousands of hours of engineering effort by not reinventing the hundreds of wheels already in the platform. Don't succumb to "not invented here" syndrome.
Check out a few dashboards I designed in just a day total [1], or the vendors demos of Twitter data [2], HealthData.gov data [3], or Salesforce.com data [4].
> ugly
If you are a first time user, the default visualizations are ugly, no doubt. But for someone with design skill, the visualizations can be made quite beautiful. For wanting more tools, just add your favorite JS library and HTML to make a custom visualization.
> completely lacking in statistical tools
Fortunately, QV can link with R, allowing you to all the advanced capabilities you need. Need something more specific? Throw a microservice REST API on top of your desired application, and load that in through a GET request. There are Hadoop connectors also built in.
One thing that people often don't realize when comparing Tableau and QV, is that QV is a platform, as opposed to Tableau being just a visualization tool. QV includes ETL, task scheduling, and an in-memory analytics database.
[1]: https://imgur.com/a/3Tzni
[2]: http://us-d.demo.qlik.com/detail.aspx?appName=Social%20Media...
[3]: http://us-d.demo.qlik.com/detail.aspx?appName=Epidemiology%2...
[4]: http://us-d.demo.qlik.com/detail.aspx?appName=Salesforce.qvw