Looker vs. Plotly Chart Studio

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Looker
Score 8.3 out of 10
N/A
Looker is a BI application with an analytics-oriented application server that sits on top of relational data stores. It includes an end-user interface for exploring data, a reusable development paradigm for data discovery, and an API for supporting data in other systems.N/A
Plotly Chart Studio
Score 8.0 out of 10
N/A
Plotly headquartered in Montreal offers Chart Studio, a data visualization tool with an open source and free cloud editions, as well as enterprise editions deployable on-cloud or on-premise. The vendor describes Chart Studio as a sophisticated editor for creating D3.js and WebGL charts.
$99
per month
Pricing
LookerPlotly Chart Studio
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
Private Hosting
$99.00
per month
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
LookerPlotly Chart Studio
Free Trial
YesNo
Free/Freemium Version
NoNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeRequiredNo setup fee
Additional DetailsMust contact sales team for pricing.
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
LookerPlotly Chart Studio
Considered Both Products
Looker
Chose Looker
Looker seems friendlier and more accessible.
Chose Looker
Looker was the most customizable option for our business and cost wise made the most sense. They do have a free tier option that some of the other weren't offering to us at the time. Looker has a great- mobile app solution while tableau is a desktop-based platform. Tableau also …
Chose Looker
The biggest advantage that Looker Studio has is that it's really easy to use and to distribute to other use. You can have a really complex report set up in a couple of minutes with an extract data source that enables Looker to update really fast.
Chose Looker
Looker is less complex to use and links directly to google suite which we use across the business and personally think is a better user experience than microsoft.
Chose Looker
We have not used any other products; we've only ever needed to use Looker Studio and didn't need to demo anything else because it provided everything we needed.
Chose Looker
Looker stacks up well against other data providers for usability and friendly interfaces, plus the ability to customise. We actually integrate Looker with other analytics tools in the same sphere (power bi, dreamdata and others) so that we can have one comprehensive dashboard …
Chose Looker
In my opinion, Looker is no Power BI. It is good, but I think Power BI is amazing. That said, in my experience, Power BI is nowhere near as easy to setup and report on Google services as Looker is. We plan to continue using Power BI for c-suite and corporate reporting, …
Chose Looker
Looker is a free and easier analytics and dashboard tool. It provides enough data and features to get things done and analyze marketing data. The other tools have more advanced features and are more suited for other things besides marketing.
Chose Looker
Tableau provides additional visual functionality and is great for more in-depth visuals or further data exploration, but it is costly and an extremely robust solution for simple data reporting. Looker can't be beat when it comes to integrating with other G-Suite tools. All in …
Chose Looker
Looker is a lot less overwhelming and lets you take the data that you have in Google analytics to make it understandable, focused and specific to the audience that is viewing the content. I haven’t used any other tools, but feel because of the ease of accessibility and cost, …
Chose Looker
I prefer agency analytics as it has a lot more agnostic integration options and is much speedier but does come at a cost. I would recommend this over Looker studio for sure. It has great templates to use too and allows for more customisation and racing benchmarks which is a …
Chose Looker
We'll still use Semrush's reporting for some clients - depending on the metrics which are important for them and whether they have an interest in live reporting or simply monthly PDF reports.
Chose Looker
If you company is using Google suite products, Looker is a no-brainer. Tableau is probably the most flexibly but as a result it has the least governance capabilities. Power BI is kind of old-school in terms of how it feels to use it. I think in general, Looker brings a lot of …
Chose Looker
Better in terms of data configuration with slight harder learning curve, available help material is not that much and we usually have to connect with Looker Help with chat for our data and analysis questions. While Looker offers a wide range of visualization options, there were …
Chose Looker
Looker Studio, you can easily report on data from various sources without programming. Looker Studio is available at no charge for creators and report viewers. Enterprise customers who upgrade to Looker Studio Pro will receive support and expanded administrative features, …
Chose Looker
It takes forever sometimes to have data ready in tableau dashboard, and also it takes effort to maintain each dashboards. We do not have so many efforts to maintain all. Also, we need to be able to see data faster and therefore take actions and work faster. With Looker we might …
Chose Looker
Looker gives you options to integrate external APIs with great ease. Our data analytics team is able to easily use multiple data sources as input to the Looker dashboard, and everything is consolidated in one single Dashboard. You also have an option for Shared folders to be …
Chose Looker
I chose Looker because can incorporate multiple sources, mostly which are Google owned. The data can sync automatically, and the graphs are visually appealing.
Chose Looker
Looker Studio is not as robust as Tableau or Microsoft BI. So it does not provide quite as much insight or depth and it has more limitations overall then the other major reporting products. However, it is also free and connects perfectly with other Google products. Plus, all of …
Chose Looker
Technically, Power BI is much more complete and powerful, but it's like an ocean liner. I didn't need all that equipment. In my case, I needed to move more quickly, like on a speedboat, to build a page with several data sources in a single source of truth that could be easily …
Chose Looker
Looker is a free tool to use on the basic level, which can't really compare apples to apples since all of the other services are paid services. Looker already has a leg up because of that. The other platforms definitely have more features and capabilities off the bat because it …
Plotly Chart Studio
Chose Plotly Chart Studio
Microsoft BI (MSBI) and Tableau Desktop
Features
LookerPlotly Chart Studio
BI Standard Reporting
Comparison of BI Standard Reporting features of Product A and Product B
Looker
7.5
Ratings
9% below category average
Plotly Chart Studio
8.0
Ratings
1% below category average
Pixel Perfect reports6.50 Ratings8.00 Ratings
Customizable dashboards8.30 Ratings00 Ratings
Report Formatting Templates7.50 Ratings00 Ratings
Ad-hoc Reporting
Comparison of Ad-hoc Reporting features of Product A and Product B
Looker
6.9
Ratings
15% below category average
Plotly Chart Studio
9.0
Ratings
14% above category average
Drill-down analysis6.50 Ratings00 Ratings
Formatting capabilities6.70 Ratings00 Ratings
Integration with R or other statistical packages5.70 Ratings9.00 Ratings
Report sharing and collaboration8.80 Ratings00 Ratings
Report Output and Scheduling
Comparison of Report Output and Scheduling features of Product A and Product B
Looker
8.0
Ratings
2% below category average
Plotly Chart Studio
-
Ratings
Publish to Web7.70 Ratings00 Ratings
Publish to PDF7.90 Ratings00 Ratings
Report Versioning7.90 Ratings00 Ratings
Report Delivery Scheduling8.40 Ratings00 Ratings
Data Discovery and Visualization
Comparison of Data Discovery and Visualization features of Product A and Product B
Looker
6.6
Ratings
19% below category average
Plotly Chart Studio
8.5
Ratings
9% above category average
Pre-built visualization formats (heatmaps, scatter plots etc.)7.70 Ratings9.00 Ratings
Location Analytics / Geographic Visualization7.50 Ratings8.00 Ratings
Predictive Analytics4.60 Ratings00 Ratings
Access Control and Security
Comparison of Access Control and Security features of Product A and Product B
Looker
7.4
Ratings
14% below category average
Plotly Chart Studio
-
Ratings
Multi-User Support (named login)7.60 Ratings00 Ratings
Role-Based Security Model7.30 Ratings00 Ratings
Multiple Access Permission Levels (Create, Read, Delete)7.30 Ratings00 Ratings
Report-Level Access Control7.40 Ratings00 Ratings
Mobile Capabilities
Comparison of Mobile Capabilities features of Product A and Product B
Looker
5.3
Ratings
37% below category average
Plotly Chart Studio
-
Ratings
Responsive Design for Web Access5.10 Ratings00 Ratings
Mobile Application5.00 Ratings00 Ratings
Dashboard / Report / Visualization Interactivity on Mobile5.90 Ratings00 Ratings
Best Alternatives
LookerPlotly Chart Studio
Small Businesses
Yellowfin
Yellowfin
Score 8.6 out of 10
Supermetrics
Supermetrics
Score 9.8 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
Reveal
Reveal
Score 10.0 out of 10
Supermetrics
Supermetrics
Score 9.8 out of 10
Enterprises
Kyvos Semantic Layer
Kyvos Semantic Layer
Score 9.5 out of 10
IBM Analytics Engine
IBM Analytics Engine
Score 8.6 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
LookerPlotly Chart Studio
Likelihood to Recommend
8.3
(0 ratings)
8.0
(0 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
9.2
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Usability
8.8
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Availability
10.0
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Performance
6.0
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
8.8
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Implementation Rating
10.0
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Configurability
10.0
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Ease of integration
10.0
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Product Scalability
10.0
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Vendor post-sale
10.0
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Vendor pre-sale
10.0
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
LookerPlotly Chart Studio
Likelihood to Recommend
When data drives potential for new orders, Looker earns its place in our tech stack. If, on the other hand, we are hoping for pipeline generation, Looker is useful if you are willing to repeatedly go check customer utilizations .... it is not appropriate if you are hoping to automate data analysis for this purpose.
Read full review
Plotly Chart Studio is great at creating interactive charts and also maintain a repository of every chart ever created in the organization. Moreover these charts can be searched by other users and used for different purposes. It is also very useful for data science companies as it has APIs for Python, Julia and other languages to create charts within the development environment and then publish to Chart Studio.
Read full review
Pros
  • It is very easy to start a new dashboard and configure what you want to display by just selecting/dragging from the list of available columns.
  • It is intuitive, mainly if you use other Google services like Google Sheets.
  • The look and feel is modern and nice.
  • It it very useful to have an immediate visual overview of the data in a spreadsheet.
Read full review
  • Connects to almost every kind of data source like SQL, Excel, MS Access, flat files and more.
  • Charts get saved to the repository and are re-used by multiple users.
  • No need of manual intervention in order to refresh the charts every time the data gets changed.
Read full review
Cons
  • I wish I could get more granular in the Google ad data, such as down to the campaign type, instead of having to see only all campaigns.
  • The setup can be time-consuming if you're not using the product regularly.
  • Editing the dashboard requires a few logins; I wish it was more seamless.
Read full review
  • Lack of customer support
  • Sometimes fails to visualize extremely large datasets ( probably also due to computer resource constraints)
Read full review
Likelihood to Renew
We are very haooy with Looker, it provides us with all the funciomalities we need for both the day to day oerformance tracking and longer periods reporting. It is easy to use for account managers, configurable and customizable for soecialists and what is most imoortant, our clinets generally really love it
Read full review
No answers on this topic
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
No answers on this topic
Reliability and Availability
No objections
Read full review
No answers on this topic
Performance
Somehow resources heavy, both on server and client. I recommned at least 50Mbs data rate and high performance desktop comouter to be abke to run comolex tasks and configure larger amount of data. On the other hand, the client does not need to worry when viewing, the performance is usually ok
Read full review
No answers on this topic
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
No answers on this topic
Implementation Rating
Very satisfied, easy to implement
Read full review
No answers on this topic
Alternatives Considered
In my opinion, Looker is no Power BI. It is good, but I think Power BI is amazing. That said, in my experience, Power BI is nowhere near as easy to setup and report on Google services as Looker is. We plan to continue using Power BI for c-suite and corporate reporting, especially for internal databases, but will gladly use Looker for our marketing information for AdWords, Analytics, Search Console, and YouTube.
Read full review
Read full review
Return on Investment
  • Other than some people not liking the numbers, I don't see any negative impacts; we haven't experienced that.
  • The reports help us unravel the story of our users and how they are sifting through our pages.
  • Our clients enjoy seeing the numbers to understand better what stands out on their sites.
  • The reports have helped us see what campaigns are working and where we need to tweak things.
  • The reports have enabled us to have better conversations with stakeholders about how their web pages should be modified, edited, etc., to reflect the data.
Read full review
  • Free software for faster visualization generation
  • Better collaboration with other researchers on visualizations
  • Real time inference on data changes
Read full review
ScreenShots

Looker Screenshots

Screenshot of a Looker dashboard with a geo chart.