Microsoft is not moving, still solid at the top with a “comprehensive and visionary product roadmap”. Microsoft are on all shortlists when evaluating BI tools and the IT departments are usually Microsoft friendly. On the downside, Microsoft BI involves multiple products with little integration and their cloud offering is Azure only.

Tableau drops a bit but is a Leader, thanks to the popularity of its product, high customer satisfaction scores and a strong roadmap. Easy to use without the need of coding, having a fanatic user base and a strong momentum in the market. On the downside, Tableau lack support for querying multiple fact tables and complex schemas in a single data source, the decline in quality of support and problems with moving from perpetual to subscription-based licensing model.

ThoughtSpot has moved from the Visionaries Quadrant to the Leaders Quadrant, thanks to strong execution, high customer satisfaction scores and rapid innovation. They provide Google-like search in data with Natural Language and AI at scale. ThoughtSpot have a flexible price model and a high momentum.

On the downside, ThoughtSpot has gaps in data preparation, visual exploration, dashboards and architecture. Data must be prepared and cleansed using third-party tools, it lacks important chart types and dashboards are basic.

Customers use ThoughtSpot to complement other BI products as it does not fulfil the full spectrum of analytic and BI requirements. As a fairly new company they have limited partner network and to date, all deployments have been handled directly by ThoughtSpot itself. They only have 200+ customers.

Qlik’s position in the Leaders quadrant is partly attributable to its strong product roadmap, geographic reach and market understanding. Qlik has added Augmented features with the Cognitive Engine and the improved self-service capabilities together with the Insight Advisor helps users find useful insights faster with automated chart generation. Qlik’s scalable in-memory engine enables customers to build robust, interactive, visual applications with support for multiple data sources, complex data models and complex calculations. Qlik was first in having a vision for multi-cloud deployments managed in a single interface. Qlik continues to execute on its augmented analytics roadmap, as well as improve its data preparation and embedded analytics capabilities. Qlik has a large and active user community and score high on Gartner Peer Insights reviews.

On the downside for Qlik are its market responsiveness scores that are lower than those of other Leaders and the migration experience from QlikView to Qlik Sense where Qlik now has introduced new dual licensing models and new product features to bridge the gaps.