TrustRadius: an HG Insights company

Looker

Score8.2 out of 10

465 Reviews and Ratings

What is Looker?

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.

Read more details.

Categories & Use Cases

Media

Screenshot of a Looker dashboard with a geo chart.

Screenshot of a Looker dashboard with a geo chart.

Looker Key Features

Learn about the best (and worst!) features Looker has to offer, as determined by TrustRadius' reviewers.
Based on 465 ratings of Looker's features
View all Looker features

Top Performing Features

  • Report sharing and collaboration

    Report sharing and collaboration is the ability to easily share reports with others.

    Category average: 8.1

  • Customizable dashboards

    Customizable dashboards are dashboards providing the builder some degree of control over the look and feel and display options.

    Category average: 8.3

  • Report Delivery Scheduling

    Report Delivery Schedule is the ability to have reports delivered to a destination at a specific data and time.

    Category average: 8.2

Areas for Improvement

  • Responsive Design for Web Access

    Web design aimed at producing easy-to-read sites across a range of different devices.

    Category average: 7.7

  • Mobile Application

    A dedicated app for iOS and/or Android.

    Category average: 7.1

  • Predictive Analytics

    Predictive Analytics is the ability to build forecasting models based on existing data sets.

    Category average: 7.2

Who Buys & Uses Looker

Looker Reviews

What users are saying about Looker.
View all Looker reviews

Pros

  • Robust data visualization and interactive dashboard creation
  • Effective data integration for unifying disparate sources
  • High degree of customization and flexibility for tailored metrics

Cons

  • Steep learning curve requiring technical skills for report setup
  • Performance issues, particularly slow loading times with large datasets
  • Limited customization and formatting options for tables and branding

Looker The Market Leader for a Reason

Incentivized
Verified User
Professional in Corporate (1001-5000 employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Looker is our main business intelligence tool that we use for for self-service analytics, pulling raw data for use with other tools, creating dashboards and reports, and for generating data visualizations. It's used across domains in our company for a multitude of use cases such as product, revenue, and operations analytics.

Pros

  • Drag & Drop Data Querying
  • Charts / Visualizations
  • Dashboards

Cons

  • Flexibility
  • Governance Features

Return on Investment

  • Stakeholder friendly visualizations and dashboards
  • Leaner analytics team thanks to self-service capabilities
  • Impactful insights that drive business value

Alternatives Considered

Tableau Cloud and Microsoft Power BI

Other Software Used

Snowflake, dbt, Mixpanel

Looker is easy to use

Incentivized
Verified User
Employee in Information Technology (501-1000 employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Looker is the main reporting platform in my workplace. It's used for simple cohort information, to complex dashboards for meetings and tracking. As an analytics user, I find it easy to navigate and find the report and information needed. It's also easy to integrate with Google Sheets and other platforms.

Pros

  • Reporting
  • Analytics
  • Integration

Cons

  • For all my requirements, I didn't have any issues so far

Return on Investment

  • Improved user experience
  • Improved time to report
  • Improved response time

Alternatives Considered

Microsoft Power BI

Other Software Used

Braze, Google Sheets, Atlassian Jira, Slack

Looker Helpful Data and Reporting Tool

Incentivized
Verified User
Account Manager in Marketing (51-200 employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Looker to as a centralized platform to track and manage performance metrics across a variety of use cases, programs, and projects. We are able to create anything from high-level dashboards to granular reports. The real-time updates and reporting provide us with insights on where we are performing well and where there is room for improvement.

Pros

  • reporting in real-time
  • dashboards
  • linking to data
  • customization

Cons

  • sometimes slow performance and lagging
  • layout and chart type limits
  • security concerns

Return on Investment

  • saves time on data engineering and analysis
  • acting as one source of truth for data from multiple places (spreadsheets, websites, etc.)
  • automatic report sharing saves time and manual labor

Other Software Used

Google Analytics, Google Sheets, Slack

Looker has a niche spot and it is effective in that niche.

Incentivized
Daniel DammermanView profile
Regional Sales Director in Sales at LogicMonitor (1001-5000 employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Looker provides insight and reports to various customer data points we use to identify demand, utilization, capacity, and more. We create dashboards to monitor real-time and historical customer utilization as well as to generate a pipeline by identifying customers that are under-subscribed. It is also useful for heat-mapping by allowing us to identify which customers are using or not using certain SKUs.

Pros

  • Visualization
  • Charts
  • Graphs
  • Allow for customization.

Cons

  • The setup of reports is a specialized skill that requires custom training.
  • Permissions for various users are tricky to arrange and keep straight.
  • I have not been able to figure out how to automate notifications. I always have to seek out the information I'm looking for.

Return on Investment

  • Insights on customer data utilization do drive revenue and generate ROI against this tool.
  • Affords a "place to go" to set up an "at a glance" dashboard for different customers, product SKUs, regions, etc.
  • The setup is quite difficult and could be improved to drive ROI.

Alternatives Considered

CitizenOne by Portage

Other Software Used

Outreach, Crayon Intel Pro, Clari

Easy to set up and distribute

Incentivized
Juan Camilo
Data Analyst in Information Technology at Oliver Gal (51-200 employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

One of the main uses we have for Looker it's unifying the different sources of sales that we have in a single simplified dashboard for CEO with the objective of having a single source of data to drive the Business further with its current status, sales and margins. This has brought extreme value for our CEO as she never had a full 360 view of its business.

Pros

  • Unify different sources of data
  • Handle big amounts of data
  • Provide different tools to dive in the data

Cons

  • Customization of tables
  • Formatting for tables
  • Modeling data with connections

Return on Investment

  • Included in Google business suite
  • Centralized single source data Point

Alternatives Considered

Microsoft Power BI, Tableau Desktop, SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) and Google BigQuery

Other Software Used

Microsoft Power BI, Google BigQuery, SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS), DBeaver, Microsoft Visual Studio Code

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