Making sense of Qlik Sense platforms
After multiple design and branding iterations, Qlik Sense now owns multiple platforms under its umbrella. Some of the products are renamed during the process and that can be quite confusing for some users. We think it is worth writing a blog to explain what these Qlik Sense variants are and what they are actually good for in the hopes that you get a better picture of the Qlik Sense product line.
Qlik Sense products can be divided into two main categories: cloud and on-premises instances. Below is the Current(2020) Qlik Sense family in a nutshell.
Disclaimer: This article is based on the writer’s best understanding of Qlik products, Qlik reserves the right of final explanation of all products mentioned in this article. As time goes on the product suite may change, making this article less accurate. Readers should only use it as a general guidance instead of official documentation.
Starting with Qlik Sense Enterprise on-premises.
The original version of QSE has a two license scheme, token and core based. With Qlik Sense turning into full SaaS(Software as a service) platform, token licensing is no longer viable. Existing users under the token licensing will be fine and the tokens are still valid; in fact, as far as I know, existing Qlik Sense users may still purchase more tokens even though this is no longer an option. For new users, there are two options for them: core based(CPU based) and SaaS based(Qlik SaaS license).
Under SaaS, there are two types of licenses: professional and analyser. In short, professional is for the data scientists, analyser is for business users. Analyser license is almost a view-only license.
QAP is a core based developer version of QSE, the only difference between QAP and core based QSE is that QAP does not come with the client and is mainly for API usage.
For the Cloud version of Qlik Sense, The name Qlik Cloud is no longer in use. Back then when cloud concepts were first introduced, there were no clear division between hybrid, a pure cloud instance or a Kubernetes version. Now it is divided into 3 platforms: QCS, QSE on Kubernetes and Qlik Sense business. All of them are under the same SaaS license scheme.
Qlik Sense Business is a cloud version of Qlik Sense. During the registration phase, Qlik sets up a server instance for the customer. For QSB, Qlik provides its own cloud services.
QSE on Kubernetes, which once was referred to as Qlik Elastic, allows users to deploy QSE on their own Kubernetes instances with another cloud service provider: AWS, Azure, Google Cloud etc.
The main differences between QSB and QSE on Kubernetes is QSB does not require an on-premise QSE server; QSE on Kubernetes requires a local QSE server to link to other nodes on cloud.
Another great thing about using QSB is Qlik takes all infrastructure hassle from users while QSE on Kubernetes requires users to maintain their own server environment.
Qlik Cloud Services(QCS) (once referred as QS hybrid for a short period of time) links QSE on-premise to a QSB instance. Like QSE on Kubernetes, Users need to maintain a local QSE server. Advantage of QCS is it gives the ability to scale up the number of apps for user consumption.
*Servers with old token base license will not have access to QCS and QSE on Kubernetes.
If that is confusing, below is a formulated Qlik Sense equation.
Axioms:
Qlik Sense on Qlik Cloud = x
Qlik Sense on AWS = y
Qlik Sense on-premises = z
Derived:
QSB = x
QSEoK = z+y
QCS = z+x
Hope this may help someone to understand Qlik Sense better. Leave a comment if you have any questions.
Happy coding.
-Wu