BI + AI · Qlik Sense Alternative

Qrly vs Qlik Sense

Qrly is the self-hostable BI + AI platform Qlik Sense never quite is — Qlik's AI lives in expensive Qlik Cloud Analytics + AutoML, with no real on-prem AI story and 3–9 month deployments. Qrly ships natural-language Ask (NL→SQL), AI anomaly detection and BYO LLM (local Ollama / LM Studio or cloud Claude, Gemini, OpenAI, Azure) plus embedded analytics with signed-JWT, productive in minutes at a fraction of the cost.

Qrly wins

BI + AI in one self-hosted platform — flat pricing

  • AI Ask (NL→SQL) with AI anomaly detection & performance analyzer
  • BYO LLM — local Ollama / LM Studio or cloud Claude, Gemini, OpenAI, Azure
  • Embedded analytics with signed-JWT (no separate SKU)
  • QQL across 12+ database dialects, OLAP star/snowflake models
  • Self-hostable without Qlik Cloud Analytics + AutoML licensing
  • Productive in under 5 minutes vs 3–9 month Qlik rollouts
  • Flat pricing for unlimited users
Tie / depends

Service management fundamentals

  • Both have strong alerts and subscriptions engines
  • Both ship customer / end-user self-service portals
  • Both support workflow automation with approvals
  • Both deliver dashboards and reports out of the box
  • Both integrate broadly via REST and webhooks
Qlik Sense wins

ITIL depth & enterprise ecosystem

  • Deepest ITIL-aligned implementation on the market
  • Federated CMDB with Discovery and Service Mapping
  • GRC, SecOps and HRSD modules on one platform
  • Fortune 500 reference customers and regulators
  • Pre-built industry solutions (telco, banking, public sector)
  • Massive partner and contractor ecosystem
Feature
Recommended Qrly Self-hosted · Belgium
Qlik Sense Qlik Sense, Inc.
Self-hostable on your own infra
Included
SaaS only (gov/defense exceptions)
No cap / story-point ceremony required
Included
Not cap-centric
Built-in customer embed portal
Included
Service Portal (mature)
Native Alert with auto-escalation
Included
Strong Alert engine
Native scheduled subscription
Included
Mature inbound engine
Query language with history (WAS, CHANGED)
QQL
Encoded query — strong but verbose
Azure AD + Google + LDAP + Basic simultaneously
Included
Multi-provider SSO
OIDC SSO user provisioning
Included
Included
AI with on-prem option (Ollama, LM Studio)
Included
Now Assist — cloud, separate SKU
Multi-tenant architecture out of the box
Included
Domain separation — paid config
Tableau data import on day 1
Native importer
Custom connectors / paid migration
Flat pricing (unlimited users)
Included
Named-user + module-based, 6-fig min
Productive in under 5 minutes
Included
3–9 month implementation
EU data residency (native, not a tier)
Included
EU DCs yes — commercial negotiation
No marketplace plugin required for basics
Included
Qlik Sense Store for most extensions
Boards, dashboard, roadmaps
Included
Agile Development Suite (module)
REST API + webhooks
Included
Included
Advanced Roadmaps / portfolio planning
Included
SPM / ITBM — separate modules
Confluence-style wiki included
Question docs
Knowledge Management — module
Legend Included Partial / extra cost Not available
01 / Cost

The cost is structural, not negotiable

Named-user pricing. Module pricing — ITSM, ITOM, ITBM, SecOps and HRSD each priced separately. Implementation fees. Mandatory partners. The numbers routinely push a mid-market deal past €300,000 per year before a single workflow has been customised. And because the modules are sold independently, adding HR ticketing or security incidents later means a new commercial negotiation, not a feature flag.

Qrly's cheapest tier (The Pulse) delivers the 80% that everyone actually uses for €1,875 per year per tenant — unlimited users & projects inside the tenant. No renewal cliff. No module per-user line items. The 51st agent costs zero. So does the 501st. The finance team can stop modelling headcount against subscription elasticity — there is nothing to model.

02 / Time

Implementation measured in quarters

A mid-size Qlik Sense rollout is 3–9 months of consulting — discovery, design workshops, process mapping, CMDB seeding, portal theming, integration build-out, UAT, go-live support. The platform is capable of almost anything, and every "almost anything" is a billable day. Elapsed time is rarely the fault of the software; it is the weight of the methodology the software demands.

Qrly deployments are days, not quarters. Install, connect SSO, import your first ticket. The pattern most teams follow is: pilot this week, production next week, retire the old queue in the same month. There is no partner certification required, no sandbox instance clone cycle, no release window calendar to sync against.

03 / Platform tax

The "platform" becomes a tax

What Qlik Sense calls flexibility, most teams experience as complexity. Every customisation needs a process — a scoped app, an update set, a change window, an instance clone, sometimes a partner. The Now Platform is genuinely powerful; it is also the reason a small UI change takes two caps, and why the internal joke at almost every large customer is that the Qlik Sense team is larger than the team whose questions it holds.

Qrly picks sensible defaults, ships a flat configuration surface, and treats "change the wording on a form" as something an admin does in two clicks during a stand-up. The only update set is the Git history of your own automation scripts, and those are plain files, version-controlled like everything else in your infrastructure.

04 / Lock-in

Vendor lock-in runs deep

Qlik Sense data is hard to exfiltrate — the Table API works but is slow and rate-limited, update sets are platform-specific, attachments live in a proprietary store, and the skill pool is expensive to hire. Your workflows are written in the platform's DSL, which does not translate to anything else. Renewal season is negotiated from a position of "we are already in."

Qrly runs on your own infrastructure, exports to standard JSON, stores attachments on plain object storage, and uses plain REST and webhooks for integrations. The data is yours, portable and legible. If Qrly stops being the right answer in five years, the migration out is a script, not a programme of work.

Qrly — The Pulse

Annual flat fee · per tenant · cheapest tier
  • Annual fee per tenant €1,875
  • Users inside tenant Unlimited
  • Embedded Analytics portal Included
  • alerts and subscriptions Included
  • OIDC, SSO, on-prem AI Included
  • Self-hosting Included
3-year TCO (single tenant, 50 users): €5,625
Annual flat fee per tenant. Unlimited users & projects inside the tenant. Multi-tenant deployments scale tier-by-tier.

Qlik Sense — ITSM Professional

Named-user + modules · Now Platform SaaS
  • ITSM Standard ~€100 / user / mo
  • ITSM Professional ~€150 / user / mo
  • ITSM Enterprise ~€200–300 / user / mo
  • Implementation partner ~€150k–500k one-off
  • Annual minimum €150k+ typical
  • Now Assist AI Separate subscription
3-year TCO (50 users, Professional): €300,000 – €500,000
Including implementation. Excludes ITOM / SecOps / HRSD module pricing.

The standard migration path

Qrly pulls from Qlik Sense's own APIs — no third-party ETL, no paid connector, no partner engagement required unless you want one. The same pattern works whether you are on the current release or several families behind.

  1. Extract the core records. Incidents, requests, changes, problems and attachments pulled via the Qlik Sense REST / Table API. Paginate against incident, sc_request, change_request, problem and sys_journal_field. Rate-limit aware so your existing instance stays responsive for agents during the extract.
  2. Map identities and assets. sys_user, sys_user_group and cmdb_ci map to Qrly users, groups and assets. Table-based priority and category values map to Qrly fields — usually one-to-one, sometimes with a short lookup table for edge cases. CI relationships are preserved with typed edges, not flattened into strings.
  3. Import with history intact. Questions are created with their original Qlik Sense numbers retained as external references, so any external integration still referring to INC0012345 keeps working. Comments, worklog entries and alert breach events are preserved so QQL queries like resolution_time > sla still make sense historically.
  4. Rebuild critical workflows. Rewrite the handful of workflows that actually matter in Qrly automation. They will be far shorter — Qlik Sense's platform DSL inflates step counts for routine logic that Qrly expresses in a line or two. Most teams find they had 30–40% dead workflow branches nobody dared delete in the old system.
  5. Run in parallel, then unwind. Keep Qlik Sense read-only while the last contract runs out, and the Knowledge Base pointed at for legacy lookups until each KB article is migrated. Users typically self-migrate within two to three weeks of production cutover; the portal, email channel and assignment rules are the only surfaces most of them ever see.
Can Qrly really replace Qlik Sense?

For most organisations under a few thousand employees — yes. Qrly covers what the majority of Qlik Sense customers actually use day-to-day: incident and request tracking, Alerts, the self-service portal, scheduled subscription, approvals, automation and reports. Teams who genuinely run the full ITIL + ITOM + SecOps + HRSD + GRC stack on the Now Platform are a different conversation, and that is stated honestly.

What about ITIL processes — Incident, Problem, Change?

Qrly implements Incident, Request, Problem and Change as first-class question types, each with their own workflows, approvals, Alerts and CAB-style views. It is not ITIL-accredited to the same depth as Qlik Sense's reference implementation, but it covers what ITIL v4 Foundation-trained teams use in practice.

How do we migrate off Qlik Sense?

Qrly pulls data straight through Qlik Sense's REST / Table API. Incidents, requests, changes, problems, users, groups and CMDB CIs are extracted, mapped and imported with history and Alert events preserved. Most mid-size migrations land in four to eight weeks end-to-end.

What does Qrly cost vs Qlik Sense?

€1,875 per year per tenant on the cheapest tier (The Pulse), with unlimited users & projects inside the tenant — €5,625 over three years for a single tenant. Compared to customer-reported numbers for a 50-user ITSM Professional deal that land in the €300,000 to €500,000 range over three years once named-user fees, annual minimums and the mandatory implementation partner are counted.

Do we lose the Service Portal?

No. Qrly ships a self-service portal for end users — submit requests, track questions, browse the knowledge base, see approvals, approve / reject changes. It is less customisable than a bespoke Qlik Sense Service Portal build, and deliberately so: fewer knobs, faster setup, nothing to maintain across upgrades.

Can Qrly handle CMDB-style asset relationships?

Qrly's Assets module supports typed relationships, dependency maps and direct question linkage, which covers most practical CMDB use. It is not a full federated CMDB with Discovery probes and Service Mapping — if you genuinely need Qlik Sense Discovery + Service Mapping + ITOM Visibility, keep Qlik Sense for that slice and use Qrly for the rest.

Ready to leave the platform tax behind?

Self-hostable. Flat pricing. On-prem AI. EU data residency by default. Made in Belgium.