Qlik Sense / Qlik Analytics Platform Articles, Projects & Tutorials by Stefan Walther

Widgets vs. Visualization extensions

Widgets and visualization extensions try to achieve the same goal: Bring new custom visualizations to Qlik Sense.
It is therefore a very legitimate question, when to use which of those two approaches.

Here are some guidelines:

Use the concept of widgets if:

  • You have no (web-)programming skills and don't want to investigate too much time.
  • You have decent Html/CSS skills or you want to invest 1-2 days to learn those fundamental building-blocks of the web.
  • You have some Html/CSS code-snippets resulting into a custom visualization and you'd just like to bring those into Qlik Sense.
  • You (as a partner) would like to share a library of custom visualizations with your customer.
  • You would like to create a set of Corporate Design aligned visualization which can then be used by all Qlik Sense users.
  • Time to value is key for you.

Use the concept of visualization extensions if:

  • You have decent skills (web-)programming skills, especially covering JavaScript.
  • You need to include an external library (e.g. charting-library) into your custom visualization.
  • You need to add (whatever) piece of JavaScript to your custom visualization.