Qlik Sense and Sigma Computing rank first and second on the embedded analytics tag, and both are exemplars — Qlik at 69.7, Sigma at 68.8. The Kin Score measures the public API surface a company publishes, not the product or the company behind it. The tag is small, 25 providers, and strong: it averages 37.3 against 22.3 for the rest of the catalog. What makes this pairing worth a post is that Sigma beats Qlik on five of the six facets and still ranks second — and the reason is one of the more precise things the rubric does.
Two different ideas of where the data lives. Qlik sells a business intelligence, data integration and AI analytics platform built on its own associative engine — a hosted, tenant-scoped service where every API sits under {tenant}.{region}.qlikcloud.com and takes an API key, an OAuth 2.0 token or a signed JWT. Its access model reads freemium, with five documented plans and three documented rate limits. Sigma is warehouse-first: it stores nothing of its own and queries the customer’s Snowflake, Databricks, BigQuery, Redshift, Athena, PostgreSQL or ClickHouse live, putting a spreadsheet interface, governed data models, write-back input tables, paginated reports and embedded analytics on top. Its access model reads self-serve, with six documented rate limits and the longer compliance list — SOC 1, 2 and 3, four ISO standards, HIPAA, GDPR and CCPA — but no pricing posture on record and no plan count. If your data already lives in a cloud warehouse and must stay there, that sentence decides more than any score in this post.
Qlik ships one of the widest analytics surfaces in the catalog, and Sigma ships a tight one. Qlik publishes 78 OpenAPI documents covering 681 REST operations, 29 AsyncAPI documents carrying CloudEvents payloads for its system events, an OpenRPC document for the Engine API, a gRPC contract for server-side extensions and 39 JSON Schemas — 135 API pages in all, from Apps and Reloads to Automations. Sigma publishes a single 274-operation OpenAPI 3.1 document, split into 36 pages — Workbooks, Connections, Members, the Embed API — plus a Rust CLI generated from that same document, JavaScript embed and plugin SDKs, and three Apache-2.0 agent skills. Both run a first-party remote MCP server: Qlik’s generally available since 2026-02-10 from the Starter plan up, Sigma’s OAuth-protected for governed queries. None of these contracts were derived by us; all 126 of Qlik’s and all 34 of Sigma’s trace to the providers’ own documents.
Sigma wins five facets; Qlik wins the one that pays. Sigma takes discoverability 75.9 to 59.3, contract quality 65.2 to 55.8, contract governance 18.2 to 4.5, operational transparency 92.1 to 84.2, and developer ergonomics 85.7 to 78.6. Qlik takes access clarity — what it costs, what you may do, how you get in — 100.0 to 60.5, a 39.5-point margin at a weight of 0.20. Run the six facets through their weights and Sigma is ahead, 67.3 to 67.1. The composite is not only those six. Both companies accept writes, so both are scored on create-or-update ergonomics, a conditional facet worth 0.10, re-centred on 7.06, the mean across the providers it applies to, so that a provider without upsert is not punished for lacking what almost nobody has. Qlik scores 33.3 there and Sigma 22.2. That adds 2.6 to Qlik and 1.5 to Sigma, and the difference is the entire 0.9 by which Qlik leads. On the six core facets, Sigma is the stronger surface; on the question of whether a caller can create-or-update in one call and be told which branch ran, Qlik is.
On agents, Sigma is the one that crosses the gate. Sigma scores 45.5 and is banded agent-native; Qlik scores 43.6 and is agent-ready. Both scores clear the floor. The band is gated: agent-native also requires idempotency and a stable error envelope, and Qlik verifies its errors but documents no idempotency, so it stops a band short. Sigma documents idempotency and adds two things almost nobody in this category has — a well-known catalog and a dry-run mode, each lit by 4.0% of the 25 providers in the tag, which is Sigma alone. Both publish MCP, agent skills, reversibility and an event surface. Both are dark on agent cards, agentic commerce, and all four identity dimensions. The tag is well ahead of the rest of the catalog on MCP, 36.0% to 11.9%, and on agent skills, 40.0% to 16.0% — and lights consent identity, delegated identity and protected resource metadata for 0.0% of its members.
Pick on where your data lives, then on what you are building. If you need a full analytics platform, event-driven integration across dozens of resources and a clear commercial path in, Qlik’s surface is broader and its access clarity is perfect. If your data stays in your warehouse and you are embedding governed analytics or pointing an agent at it, Sigma’s surface is the stronger one on five of six facets and the only one in this tag that lets an agent rehearse a call before making it. What moves each number is specific: Qlik’s contract governance of 4.5 is the lowest facet either company posts — a published ruleset and declared conformance would lift it — and documenting idempotency would carry it into agent-native. Sigma closes the gap by putting pricing and plans on the record, which is most of the 39.5 points it gives away on access clarity.