If you are trying to decide between Qlik Sense and Qlik Cloud, licensing is one of the first places to start. It affects how you budget, how you grow, and how you explain costs to finance and leadership.
This post focuses only on licensing. It compares how Qlik Sense (on-prem) and Qlik Cloud Analytics think about users, capacity, and what is included in different plan tiers. Future posts in this series will cover architecture, features, integration, and mobile.
If you need help working through this in your own environment, you can always reach out to us at Arc Qlik Consulting Services.
What We Mean by Qlik Sense vs Qlik Cloud
Before diving into licensing, it helps to clarify the products.
Qlik Sense (On Prem)
Qlik Sense in this article refers to the traditional on-premises deployment that you install and manage yourself, either on your own servers or in an infrastructure as a service environment.
Licensing here is traditionally based on:
- User types, such as creators versus viewers
- Server or site licenses and infrastructure capacity
You mainly think about how many people will create content, how many will consume it, and what hardware you need to run it.
Qlik Cloud Analytics
Qlik Cloud Analytics is the software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform that Qlik offers. You do not manage the underlying infrastructure. You subscribe to a plan.
Licensing in Qlik Cloud is based on:
- Plan tiers such as Starter, Standard, Premium, and Enterprise
- Capacity for data that you analyze, measured in gigabytes
- Included features such as reporting, automations, predictive capabilities, app sizes, and access options
You mainly think about how much data you will analyze and what level of capability you need.
User-Based vs Capacity-Based Licensing
At a high level, Qlik Sense and Qlik Cloud use different lenses for licensing.
Qlik Sense (On Prem)
- Primary Focus
- Users and infrastructure
- You typically size around:
- Number of professional creators
- Number of analyzers or consumers
- Number of sites and servers
- Monitoring and control
- Licensing is enforced through user assignment, access rules, and server capacity
- You watch user counts and hardware performance
Qlik Cloud Analytics
From the Qlik Cloud Analytics pricing, the focus is:
- Primary Focus
- Capacity for data that is loaded and stored for analysis
- Plan tier that controls features and limits
- You typically size around:
- Total volume of data for analysis across your tenant in a year
- Which plan level matches your feature needs and growth
- Monitoring and control
- Admins watch capacity use for data for analysis
- Qlik provides alerts as you approach your plan capacity
- You can upgrade capacity or move to a higher plan when needed
A simple way to think about it:
| Platform | Main Licensing Focus | What You Size Around |
| Qlik Sense (On Prem) | Users and infrastructure | Creators, viewers, servers |
| Qlik Cloud Analytics | Capacity and plan tier | Data for analysis, features, scale |
Qlik Cloud Plan Tiers and What They Include
The Qlik Cloud Analytics plans are structured into tiers. Below is a summary of what is included in each, based on the current pricing page. This is a functional overview, not a copy of the site content, and not a list of prices.
Qlik Cloud Starter
Designed for small businesses and very small teams.
Key characteristics:
- Fixed number of users included
- Fixed amount of data for analysis included
- No option to purchase extra data capacity beyond what is included
Included capabilities:
- Analytics with interactive visualizations and dashboards
- AI-powered insight features that come with Qlik Cloud Analytics plans
- Standard connectors to hundreds of data sources
- Ability to move data into Qlik Cloud for relational and software as a service sources through Qlik Talend Cloud
- Sharing and collaboration within the team
- Max app size limit on the smaller side, such as 5 GB per app
- Community level support
Starter is a good fit for small companies that want to try Qlik Cloud in a contained way.
Qlik Cloud Standard
Designed for small teams and groups that need more flexibility than Starter.
Key characteristics:
- Includes user access across the tenant
- Starts with a base amount of data for analysis
- You can purchase additional capacity in defined increments, such as 25 GB blocks
Included capabilities, in addition to Starter:
- Use of unstructured data to drive insight
- Report generation and delivery
- No code automation builder that can trigger actions across connected systems
- Managed and shared spaces that improve governance and collaboration
- Personal space for each user, such as 1 GB per user
- Augmented analytics that helps users explore data more effectively
- 24×7 critical support
Standard is typically where many departmental and mid-sized deployments start.
Qlik Cloud Premium
Designed for broader rollout across a business with more advanced requirements.
Key characteristics:
- Starts with more data for analysis than Standard
- Allows additional capacity to be purchased in larger increments, such as both 25 GB and 250 GB blocks
Included capabilities, in addition to everything in Standard:
- Predictive analytics powered by automated machine learning tools
- More capacity for generative style capabilities
- Anonymous or public access for dashboards and content
- Deeper data integration options:
- Additional Qlik Talend Cloud data sources including SAP, mainframe, and legacy systems
- Seamless extraction from SAP into Qlik Cloud
- Data lineage connectors for better visibility into data flows
- Higher max app size, such as 10 GB per app
- Guided customer success onboarding
Premium is usually a match for organizations that want Qlik Cloud to be a central analytics platform, not just a small team tool.
Qlik Cloud Enterprise
Designed for large enterprises that need maximum scale and flexibility.
Key characteristics:
- Starts at a much higher data for analysis capacity
- Tailored for large deployments and broader enterprise standards
Included capabilities, in addition to everything in Premium:
- More capacity bundled into:
- Reporting
- Automations
- Public or anonymous access
- Assistants and predictive models
- Dataset sizes and number of models
- Larger default app sizes, such as 15 GB, with options to support very large apps, up to tens of gigabytes per app with additional purchases
- More personal space per user, such as 3 GB
- Multi-region tenants for global deployments
- Personalized customer success plans and onboarding
Enterprise is targeted at organizations that want to standardize on Qlik Cloud at scale.
A simple summary table:
| Plan | Sized Around | Ideal For | Highlights |
| Starter | Fixed users and fixed data capacity | Small business, pilots | Core analytics, dashboards, smaller apps, community |
| Standard | Data capacity expandable in steps | Teams and departments | User access for all, automations, reporting, spaces |
| Premium | Larger capacity and advanced features | Mid to large organizations | Predictive, more GenAI capacity, public access, SAP |
| Enterprise | Large capacity and scaled features | Large enterprises | Very large apps, more automations, multi-region, CSP |
How Qlik Cloud Measures and Monitors Usage
Qlik Cloud uses a capacity-based model, which Qlik compares to a cell phone plan in the pricing FAQ.
Key points from Qlik’s FAQ:
- Capacity-based vs consumption-based
- Capacity-based means you pay a fixed fee for a set amount of capacity.
- This gives more predictable costs than true consumption models, where monthly bills can swing up and down.
- Data for analysis as the main metric
- You estimate how much data you will load and store for analysis over a year.
- That total is what the plan is sized around.
- What happens when you approach capacity
- You keep full access to your environment.
- You receive alerts as you get close to your limit.
- You can choose to:
- Upgrade to a higher capacity
- Upgrade to a higher plan
- Additional charges only appear if you go above the limits of your plan without adjusting it.
- How admins monitor usage
- Admins can view current capacity use
- They can see which apps or datasets are driving usage
- They can use this information to plan clean-up, archiving, or upgrades
You can picture it as a progress bar labeled Data For Analysis that moves from comfortable, to approaching the limit, to an upgrade suggested.
Comparing Licensing in Practice
Most teams want to know how this affects real decisions.
How You Think About Sizing
Qlik Sense (On Prem)
You tend to ask:
- How many people will build apps, dashboards, and data models
- How many people will consume those apps
- How many environments and servers you need to support development, test, and production
User types and server footprint drive licensing and infrastructure costs.
Qlik Cloud Analytics
You tend to ask:
- How much data will we analyze across all apps over a year
- How fast that data volume is likely to grow
- Which plan level we need for:
- Reporting and scheduled outputs
- Automations and triggers
- Public access or external users
- Predictive capabilities
- SAP and advanced lineage
A practical comparison:
| Question | Qlik Sense (On Prem) | Qlik Cloud Analytics |
| How many creators vs viewers do we have | Main sizing driver | Still important but not the main metric |
| How large are our datasets | Drives hardware requirements | Drives plan and data for analysis capacity |
| Do we need external or public dashboards | Requires custom patterns or add ons | Included with Premium and Enterprise plans |
| How large are our apps | Handled through server tuning | Controlled by app size limits by plan tier |
Governance and Tenants
Plan tiers in Qlik Cloud also influence:
- How many collaboration and managed spaces you use
- How much personal space each user has
- Whether you can run tenants across multiple regions
- The level of onboarding and customer success support that comes bundled
These governance aspects become more important as analytics shifts from a single team to a company-wide platform.
If you are planning a hybrid setup or a staged migration from Qlik Sense to Qlik Cloud, it can be useful to map both licensing models side by side. This is where a short working session with a partner can help. You can learn more about our services at:
When Qlik Cloud Licensing Becomes a Better Fit
There is no single right answer. Both Qlik Sense and Qlik Cloud can make sense, depending on context.
Situations where Qlik Cloud licensing is often attractive:
- You want predictable yearly costs based on capacity, not variable month-to-month bills
- Your number of viewers is growing quickly and you want to simplify user-based calculations
- You plan to take advantage of:
- Built in reporting and automated distribution
- Automations that trigger actions in other systems
- Predictive capabilities that are available in higher tiers
- Public or external sharing of dashboards
Situations where Qlik Sense on premises may still be important:
- Strong regulatory or residency requirements tied to existing data centers
- A heavily tuned on-premises environment that will be part of a long-term migration path
- Existing investments in infrastructure that you plan to use for several more years
A common pattern is to run both during a transition period and to move workloads gradually.
How To Start Comparing Licensing For Your Organization
If you are trying to make this decision for your own team, a simple checklist helps.
- Inventory your users
- How many true creators do you have
- How many consumers
- Which groups will need access in the next 12 to 24 months
- Estimate your data for analysis
- Total size of your current analytics datasets
- Expected growth over the next few years
- How often full reloads or history loads occur
- List feature needs
- Reporting and scheduled distribution
- Automations and workflows
- Public or customer-facing dashboards
- SAP and complex source systems
- Regulatory or residency requirements
- Map to models
- How this fits with your current Qlik Sense licensing
- Which Qlik Cloud plan tier feels like a realistic starting point
You can use the “Compare all plan features” section on the Qlik pricing page to fill in detailed questions for internal review.
If you want a second set of eyes, our team at Arc can help you run concrete scenarios. You can connect with us at Contact Arc.
What Comes Next In The Series
This article focused only on licensing. In the rest of this Qlik Sense vs Qlik Cloud series, we will cover:
- Architecture and deployment differences
- Feature and capability comparisons
- Integration and data movement
- Mobile and embedded analytics
If you want to follow along, you can keep an eye on the Qlik category on our blog.
In the meantime, if you are in the middle of a licensing decision or a Qlik Cloud migration and want a simple way to talk it through, we are happy to help.