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Looker

Score8.4 out of 10

456 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.

Media

a Looker dashboard with a geo chart.

Top Performing Features

  • Report sharing and collaboration

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

    Category average: 8.1

  • Report Delivery Scheduling

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

    Category average: 8.3

  • 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

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: 7.2

  • Predictive Analytics

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

    Category average: 7.2

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

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

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

Looker is a great option.

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

I use Looker to build dashboards for our clients. It's a great way to enable the client to have "immediate" access to results without having to pull data anytime they need it manually. It also looks pretty. Looker's dashboards can be highly robust, but we use them for a snapshot approach, which I like.

Pros

  • Beautiful UI.
  • Easy to pull in data from Google ads/Google Analytics.
  • Custom metrics like AOV.

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.

Return on Investment

  • Looker allows us to make faster decisions.
  • Looker allows us to stay in the details of the data with the clients staying at a higher level.
  • Looker allows us to pull reporting faster.

Alternatives Considered

Tableau Desktop

Other Software Used

Google Ad Manager, Google Analytics, HubSpot CRM

Best Cloud-Based, Highly Customizable Option

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Looker's reporting metrics to help give us an overall picture of our clients' health and better assess where there is risk. The data points we mainly use Looker for are the adoption of our product for end users and housing our client directory and sales dashboards. Looker is a great tool with interactive dashboards that allow me to define business logic without having a large amount of SQL knowledge

Pros

  • Interactive dashboards, they are more comprehensive and detailed than other products weve used
  • API platform - we can embed analytics into a custom format
  • Collaboration - any google product makes collaborating for our fully remote company really easy and trackable

Cons

  • There is a learning curve with this product; at first it can be complicated and confusing with how robust the technology capabilities are.
  • If you have very very large data sets it can cause the performance to decline slightly. being slow or unresponsive
  • maintaining the dashboard does require input from the developers so there is a dependency on them to dedicate time to upkeep

Return on Investment

  • Provides a comprehensive screenshot of where our customers' health is at, allowing us to address risk for our large, complicated clients. This saves time and manpower when pulling these metrics
  • Data processing with security in a cloud based environment fits with our company well and was the most robust choice
  • While there is a learning curve, our less tech-savvy employees can still interact with the data and apply filters without deep knowledge. So it does have user friendly capabilities that can apply to those in non tech roles

Alternatives Considered

Tableau Cloud, Bluebirds by Salesforce and Microsoft Power BI

Other Software Used

Okta, Fathom AI, ADDX Advantage, CoPilot

Looker is easy to use

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