Geckoboard vs Qlik Sense

Geckoboard is a London-based company that makes live KPI dashboards designed to be shown on office TV screens, shared in Slack or sent as snapshots. Its focus is visibility rather than analysis: a support or sales team should be able to glance at a screen and know how today is going.

Dashboards are built with a simple drag-and-drop editor that connects to around 80 data sources, including Zendesk, HubSpot, Salesforce, Intercom, Google Analytics, Google Sheets, Excel and SQL databases, plus a Datasets API for custom data. Widgets show numbers, goals, leaderboards, and line and bar charts with status colors, and a dedicated TV mode handles rotation, layout and readability at a distance. Scheduled Slack and email sharing pushes the same metrics to remote staff. Pricing is a monthly subscription by number of dashboards and features, starting with an Essentials plan for two dashboards; there is a 14-day trial but no free plan.

Geckoboard fits customer support, sales and operations teams that want shared, always-on metrics with minimal setup. It is not a BI tool: there is little room for ad hoc exploration, joins or deep drill-downs, and the cost per dashboard is high compared with free options. Databox connects more sources and adds goal tracking for agencies, Klipfolio is more flexible but harder to build in, and Looker Studio or Grafana are free if you can handle the setup yourself.

Qlik Sense is the analytics product of Qlik, a company founded in Lund, Sweden in 1993 and now headquartered in Pennsylvania, USA, under Thoma Bravo ownership since 2016. Its core job is self-service dashboards and data exploration built on the associative engine, which keeps every value in a model linked so that each click shows both related and excluded data instead of running a fixed SQL drill-down.

Today it is sold mainly as Qlik Cloud Analytics, with a client-managed edition still available for on-premise deployments. Capabilities include interactive apps and dashboards, a load-script data layer, report automation, Qlik Predict for AutoML forecasts, and Qlik Answers for conversational questions over both dashboards and documents. Cloud plans are priced by data capacity rather than seats: Starter covers 10 users and 10 GB, while Standard and higher add capacity in 25 GB packs and do not charge for additional users.

Qlik fits data teams that model data from many sources (including SAP) and want governed apps for hundreds of business users. It is heavier to learn than Power BI, whose per-user pricing is far cheaper for Microsoft shops, and less design-flexible than Tableau for visual storytelling. Small teams that only need charts over one database will find Metabase or Looker Studio simpler.

In February 2026 Qlik made its agentic experience in Qlik Cloud generally available through Qlik Answers, together with an MCP server that lets assistants such as Claude query governed Qlik data; a Discovery Agent that flags anomalies followed in the rollout.