Solution architecture overview

Before you start building, there are six architectural decisions to make. Getting these right up front avoids costly rework - they influence each other and, together, determine how you build every component of your integration.

The six decisions

Tenancy model: Decide whether each customer gets their own isolated Qlik Cloud tenant, or whether multiple customers share one. This choice drives data isolation, compliance posture, customization flexibility, and how you manage the lifecycle of each deployment. Most production OEM deployments use a tenant per customer. See Single vs. multiple tenants.

Access route: Decide whether analytics appear embedded inside your application using qlik-embed web components, or whether users are given a direct link to the Qlik Cloud hub. Embedding takes more development effort but keeps users in your product and hides the Qlik-hosted interface. Native access requires minimal code but gives users a Qlik-branded experience. A hybrid of both is also valid for different user segments. See Embedded vs. native experience.

Branding: Decide how much of the Qlik interface your customers will see and what you want to replace. Tenant-level branding (logo, favicon, color) is applied via API. App-level theming controls colors and fonts inside Qlik Sense applications. The available options differ between embedded and native access patterns, so this decision connects back to your access route choice. See Brand Qlik Cloud.

Data modeling: Decide how Qlik Sense applications are structured: whether all customers share a single app with row-level security, or each customer gets a template instance with isolated data. This affects both security and your ability to customize the experience per customer. See Data modeling.

Data architecture: Decide how your customers’ data lands in Qlik Cloud - whether each tenant reloads from a data source directly, whether you stage data centrally and distribute it, or whether you land it in cloud storage close to each tenant. This decision sets your reload complexity, concurrency requirements, and cost profile. See Data architecture.

Automation strategy: Decide how you automate tenant provisioning and updates across your customer base. Qlik Automate provides no-code workflow templates that cover the most common operations out of the box. As your maturity grows, you can layer in CI/CD pipelines that trigger Automate workflows or call Qlik’s REST APIs directly. See Design automation.

Working through the decisions

The decisions are not independent - your tenancy model shapes what branding options make sense, your data architecture constrains what modeling approaches are practical, and your automation strategy determines how much development investment you’ll need for ongoing operations. Work through them in the order presented in the playbook, revisiting earlier choices as later ones reveal constraints.

Next steps

Start with the foundational choice: Single or multiple tenants