Qlik's vision, even before releasing Qlik Sense, has been making its powerful associative data engine more easily accessible so it can be leveraged in any form or capacity a customer or project requires. As such, developers have invested heavily in the past couple of years in developing comprehensible application programming interface (APIs) to allow developers to communicate with the Qlik engine and its associated services.

With an API in place, developers can leverage the Qlik product in their way and build customized solutions on top of it or integrate it with existing platforms. There are practically no limits to how Qlik can be used, making it a tremendously powerful technology. At the same time, building solutions on top of an API requires notable development effort compared to Qlik Sense's user-friendly way of creating dashboards, using...