Likelihood to Recommend It is very suitable for complete corporate BI solutions. If you see BI as embedding information into your organization and business processes, and thus as more than just a few scattered dashboards and reports, arcplan is your platform. It's less suitable for ad-hoc reporting and data discovery. It can do it (everything is possible), but there is strong competition in this area.
Read full review Quick dashboards from
Google Sheets - Easier to do the graphs than in
Google Sheets - Operational dashboards to be used in the day-to-day work - It is good both for retrospective data and to do a pulse check of the current status - Better for not giant amounts of data and not multiple data sources. - If you need a lot of graphs to be displayed on the same page, it can be a bit glitchy during configuration (then the use works fine).
Read full review Pros Excellent dashboard. Well advanced BI metrics. Better interfacing to other DW. Read full review Filtering - you can filter across different dimensions and metrics to get a more specific "cut" of data Refreshing - data automatically ingests into Looker which allows reports to be updated and backfilled in real time Conditional Reporting - you can leverage Looker's reporting features to flag when a given metric or KPI falls below or above a specified threshold. For example, if you had a daily sales benchmark in a SAAS organization, you could use Looker to flag whenever daily sales falls above or below the benchmark Read full review Cons Positioning and marketing. Most BI vendors use a non-technical sales strategy and focus on shiny, sexy dashboards to sell the story. In order to position arcplan fairly and correctly, the technical and business advantages need to be part of a sales story. So, it is not really an easy product to sell to customers, if it has to compete with now-to-wow-five-minute products. Learning/training for developers. It's easy to learn the basics of arcplan, because the interface is logical. But nothing prevents a beginning developer from creating a monstrous application, because there is no prescribed architecture. It really takes some experience to become a good arcplan architect. It's a disadvantage resulting from one of arcplan's biggest advantages. Data connectors: arcplan standard comes with a connector of your choice. Additional connectors need to be purchased separately. Many other products come with a full range of connectors. Read full review Looker is less graphical or pictorial which makes it less attractive Consumes a lot of memory when there are multiple rows and columns, impacts performance too At times when we download huge chunks of raw data from Looker dashbords, the time taken to prepare the file is enormous - The user fails to understand if Looker has frozen or if the data is getting prepared in the background for downloading. In turn, user ends up triggering multiple downloads Read full review Likelihood to Renew We've been very happy with Looker so far, and all teams in the organization are starting to see its value, and use it on a frequent basis. It has quickly become our accessible "source of truth" for all data/metrics.
Read full review Usability Looker is relatively easy to use, even as it is set up. The customers for the front-end only have issues with the initial setup for looker ml creations. Other "looks" are relatively easy to set up, depending on the ETL and the data which is coming into Looker on a regular basis.
Read full review Support Rating Never had to work with support for issues. Any questions we had, they would respond promptly and clearly. The one-time setup was easy, by reading documentation. If the feature is not supported, they will add a feature request. In this case, LDAP support was requested over OKTA. They are looking into it.
Read full review Alternatives Considered Personally, I prefer
QlikView not because it's more stable but simply just for the looks of the dashboard. One of my clients in Sydney recently moved from arcplan to
QlikView . The reason was mainly looks and that
QlikView has more training materials for the support users to train with. So in all, it does not really stack well against
QlikView .
Read full review Looker is an off-the-shelf, free tool for Google business users. Other than the internal cost of time to build, we had no costs to set up what we needed to do. Knowledge sharing internally and using templates greatly reduced this cost, making the overall cost very low.
Read full review Return on Investment Allowing others to self-serve their own analytics and connect it to Looker simply and easily has helped unblock the central data team so they can instead focus on validated dashboards whilst stakeholders manage their day-to-day analysis themselves. Countless engineering hours have been freed up by not having to manage every user permission for each BI tool; we have a BYOBI approach; Bring Your Own BI Creation and management of a semantic layer (LookML =Looker Modeling Language ) allows peoples sandboxes and production databases to become clutter free. Minor adjustments, conditional fields, and even some modelling can all be done in LookML which doesn't need oversight or governance from the central data team. LookML, specifying drilldown fields and their sub-queries, as well as generally creating dynamic parameters with Liquid are all great features, but can have a steep learning curve. it may take some time to understand how to create this middle layer correctly, or even pose a risk of inheriting complex code from another source which can be unmaintainable if it becomes too big. Some level of governance is recommended if Looker is used by a large number of editors. Read full review ScreenShots