Looker
Top Rated
Looker
Overview
Recent Reviews
Awards
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Popular Features
View all 20 featuresCustomizable dashboards (62)
8.3
83%
Formatting capabilities (62)
8.1
81%
Drill-down analysis (63)
7.9
79%
Report sharing and collaboration (64)
7.8
78%
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Pricing
View all pricingEntry-level set up fee?
- No setup fee
For the latest information on pricing, visithttps://looker.com/product/pricing
Offerings
- Free Trial
- Free/Freemium Version
- Premium Consulting / Integration Services
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Features Scorecard
BI Standard Reporting
7.9
79%
Ad-hoc Reporting
7.7
77%
Report Output and Scheduling
7.6
76%
Data Discovery and Visualization
6.7
67%
Access Control and Security
7.3
73%
Mobile Capabilities
6.2
62%
Product Details
What is Looker?
Looker is a business intelligence application with an analytics-oriented application server that sits on top of relational data stores. The Looker platform includes an end-user interface for exploring data, a reusable development paradigm for creating data discovery experiences and an extensible API set so the data can exist in other systems.
Looker Features
BI Platform Features
- Supported: Administration via Web Interface
- Supported: Live Connection to External Data
- Supported: In-memory data model
- Supported: Multi-Data Source Reporting (Blending)
- Supported: Data warehouse / dictionary layer
Supported Data Sources Features
- Supported: Oracle
- Supported: MS SQL Server
- Supported: IBM DB2
- Supported: Postgres
- Supported: MySQL
- Supported: Cloudera Hadoop
- Supported: Hortonworks Hadoop
- Supported: EMC Greenplum
- Supported: IBM Netezza
- Supported: HP Vertica
- Supported: ParAccel
- Supported: SAP Hana
- Supported: Teradata
- Supported: Sage 500
- Supported: SAP
BI Standard Reporting Features
- Supported: Pixel Perfect reports
- Supported: Customizable dashboards
- Supported: Report Formatting Templates
Ad-hoc Reporting Features
- Supported: Drill-down analysis
- Supported: Formatting capabilities
- Supported: Integration with R or other statistical packages
- Supported: Report sharing and collaboration
Report Output and Scheduling Features
- Supported: Publish to Web
- Supported: Publish to PDF
- Supported: Output Raw Supporting Data
- Supported: Report Versioning
- Supported: Report Delivery Scheduling
Data Discovery and Visualization Features
- Supported: Pre-built visualization formats (heatmaps, scatter plots etc.)
- Supported: Location Analytics / Geographic Visualization
- Supported: Support for Machine Learning models
- Supported: Integration with R or other statistical packages
Access Control and Security Features
- Supported: Multi-User Support (named login)
- Supported: Role-Based Security Model
- Supported: Multiple Access Permission Levels (Create, Read, Delete)
- Supported: Report-Level Access Control
- Supported: Table-Level Access Control (BI-layer)
- Supported: Field-Level Access Control (BI-layer)
Mobile Capabilities Features
- Supported: Responsive Design for Web Access
- Supported: Dashboard / Report / Visualization Interactivity on Mobile
Looker Screenshots
Looker Video
See the simple process of connecting your database to Looker and gaining insights to your data with Rafael Jara-Simkin of Looker. With the yaml based modeling language, LookML, your business logic is easily repeatable and reusable, allowing your analysts to better leverage the...
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Looker Competitors
Looker Technical Details
Deployment Types | On-premise, SaaS |
---|---|
Operating Systems | Windows, Linux, Mac |
Mobile Application | No |
Supported Countries | United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Mexico, Germany, France, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Brazil |
Supported Languages | English |
Frequently Asked Questions
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.
Reviewers rate Customizable dashboards highest, with a score of 8.3.
The most common users of Looker are from Mid-sized Companies (51-1,000 employees) and the Computer Software industry.
Comparisons
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Reviews and Ratings
(280)
Reviews
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May 04, 2022
Analyze your data efficiently with Looker
We can work on our data using this tool. Our use case is that we are working on a large analytics project where we have to integrate data from wide sources into the system and transform the data activities accordingly. Our different divisions used the tool (marketing, consulting, sales, etc). Looker is somehow most efficient for low velocity and volume data. Users may face issues while working on large data. It can be assumed to be a day-to-day data analytics solution for your organization that helps manage your data in a more organized way.
- The UI is simple and easy to understand.
- Online training materials is sufficient to work on the solution.
- Helps in keeping the data organized.
- Able to analyze data and visualize it.
- Easy to integrate with data sources.
- Addition of advanced level of visualization
- Must be scalable when you have a large amount of data.
- Data uploading time could be better.
- Wide options for data integration should be added.
July 30, 2021
Looker for our Business Operations team
Our Business Operations & Systems department is currently using [Looker] to create a visual dashboard. We primarily use it to track our end-to-end business process efficiencies across different programs. We then publish these dashboards for our organization.
- Visuals are amazing
- UI is easy to use
- Advanced formula creation seems to lack in comparison to other tools
May 14, 2021
Excellent tool with impeccable support team!
Looker is being used by our organization to manage and build dashboards for our team, both for our website and data analytics as well as some of our sales data in order to track and manage our sales kpis. Our sales manager and client services team have used this product to be able to track these and build dashboards.
- Building dashboards
- Great interface that is simple enough
- Can collaborate with other teammates
- Can be slow at times
- Takes a lot of upfront investment.
- Better on the go and mobile tools.
May 08, 2021
Awesome software for our team
Looker is being used by our company to make reports and graphs for both our own company initiatives, as well as for our clients. Our whole organization uses it at least to view data, but a lot of us work within the software to make it edits. This tool lets us build dashboards to show all of our company numbers simply and upfront.
- It is simple to set up and create normal dashboards and graphs.
- You can build from the templates or customize, the options are endless.
- Interface is simple and easy to use.
- Can be slow at times.
- The set up initially can be tough.
- Customizing visualization could be improved.
Looker is an ETL (extract, transform, load) software, which means that it has the ability to ingest data. Users can create dashboards in various flavors, such as dashboards, reports and line graphs. The platform looks well-designed and is really easy to navigate. All the three columns and the dropdown boxes are well thought-out. These offer a level of customization to an extent that you can further customize them according to your needs.
- The core-visibility lets you monitor your entire workflow along with live data.
- The user interface makes the task of figuring out the data easy.
- Find the relevant data that your business needs.
- Build models on the fly.
- Customer service could be more responsive.
- Platform can be expensive depending on the level of your business.
May 02, 2021
Awesome product for data visualization
I mostly use Looker to manage our social media numbers and turn that into reports and visual data for the rest of the team and for our clients. I know a lot of the rest of the company uses this tool as well, but this is the purpose specifically for me.
- Looker is easy to learn which is helpful because I can show other members of our team how to edit existing charts and graphs or reports.
- Looker customer service team is very supportive and helpful for us.
- Looker saves us a lot of time
- Some of the customization tools for graphs and charts could be improved.
- Could have a cheaper version is people are using for less complicated tasks.
May 02, 2021
Turn data into meaningful decisions
We use Looker for data migration and visualization. It is great for turning loads of data into meaningful graphs and charts that can be made sense of. It helps us drive decisions that make sense for our company.
- Data migration
- Data visualization
- Graphing
- Charting
- Interface
- Customer support
- Onboarding
April 30, 2021
Look no further than into Looker
Looker currently is being used by our organization to make business decisions on buying or selling inventory in the ad tech space. The key decisions being made allow for the KPIs to give a larger return on investment or minimize cap losses based on the reporting the metrics that looker provides for us.
- Ease of use of report creation
- SQL syntax to modify or create reports
- Drag and drop functionalities
- Dashboard creation
- More data source connections
- Licensing model
- Integration with Active Directory or LDAP. Only OKTA for now.
April 30, 2021
An amazing data visualization tool
We use Looker to be able to visually analyze our data. It is being used by most of our organization, but especially our Operations team. I believe this is a support important tool because just having the data only tells half of the story if you cannot visualize it and be able to notice trends and reasons for discrepancies in data.
- user friendly
- searching
- visualization
- limited charting
- interface
- not as widely used
April 28, 2021
Wonderful tool and customer support
Looker is being used by our organization in order to connect databases and create data models so we can make data driven decisions for our organization. It is only being used by our team who conducts data analysis, though we do of course share the results of the analysis with the rest of the team. It solves the problem of displaying data in a visual way.
- User friendly.
- Good UI.
- Reporting.
- CPU usage.
- Slow.
- Bugs.
April 22, 2021
Looker helps us organize our business data
Looker is being used across our entire organization and by every single department. We generally use Looker to address business-related metrics like health checks, MRR, C$R. It is a single source for us to determine how our business is progressing. It is a great tool to get cross-functional data and use that to provide feedback or make changes to our structure or initiatives.
- SQL Capabilities
- Pivots and calculations
- Easy filtering
- The visualization isn't the best
- The left sidebar coloring makes it hard to see what is selected (bad for accessibility)
April 07, 2021
Looker is pretty good for the price
We use Looker across the whole organization. It is used for integrated reporting (known as Looks) for delivery via email or GUI. Our company uses it for its own reports and we also publish customer-facing reports with it, on a daily basis. Essentially, it is a delivery program and some other things for our ETL process.
- Provides interesting data, provided the databases exist for it to be sliced.
- Delivery system is relatively easy to use.
- Customers can pick up the report creation pretty quickly.
- API is difficult to use, especially with auth problems.
- The LookMLs can be confusing with referenced objects.
- Maintaining on-prem servers requires a lot of maintenance.
- In the cloud the data writes slowly.
November 17, 2020
Solid performer
Looker was basically developed for our Circulation Dept. Since they have DFP data in the data warehouse already, We were using Yieldex for advertising reporting but it is pricey. I started building dashboards for our advertising department and people love it. My VP is planning to work with other Hearst newspapers to get them on board.
- It allows you to create looks for routine focus analysis.
- It allows you to build a dashboard simply by combining looks.
- The reports are easily shared simply by forwarding the link.
- Your work will unlikely be altered by other people with the option of 'Explore Here'.
- The charts are pretty basic.
- Presenting KPIs on the dashboard requires combining different 'looks' instead of one look including all.
- 'Look' cannot be exported in PDF format.
- It requires a lot of work to include multimedia.
- It requires good knowledge of SQL. (but once everything has been built, the users do not need it.)
- Deep learning curve.
October 04, 2019
Looker is a game changer for our company reporting
Looker is being used across the whole organization. Looker is our main visualization tool for all of our company reporting.
- Easy visualization based on SQL Logic.
- Easy to create pull and push changes.
- Beautiful graphs.
- Custom SQL writers can be slow.
- Sometimes development mode has errors for no reason.
October 03, 2019
Data and Reporting Made Easy
Looker is used by many departments in our organization as a hub for business intelligence data. We are all able to access data dashboards in a smooth and slick UI for various uses, including sales, marketing, and research. It's a great way for stakeholders across the organization to view customized, high and low-level metrics. We can use data from Looker for detailed analysis and reports that are shared across units such as BizOps and Marketing.
- It's user-friendly enough to democratize data for the entire organization; it's functional enough to be used by all users regardless of their experience with BI tools.
- Ability to quickly connect to data sources without heavy back-end data engineering requirements.
- Filters, visualization and data elements keep all of the information front and center and logically ordered for a power user.
- It can be difficult to customize the visualizations.
- Security groups and content restrictions can be confusing to set up and maintain.
- The tool can slow down for large and complex queries.
September 28, 2019
Great robust product that helps scale
We are using Looker throughout the whole company. We decided to use it after careful consideration and even considering building the tool internally but realized it was going to be too expensive and time-consuming. We use it for building all sorts of reports and tracking and to do data validation.
- Great place to combine all your data and make sources talk to each other.
- The dashboard building is very easy and gives you a chance to create and judge any data you need.
- With the reports, you can set up a save and then have them emailed to you automatically. It is a fantastic way of not having to recreate things all the time.
- It takes quite a bit of time to set up initially and the onboarding process is long.
- You need to have an internal team that is dedicated to just setting it up and getting the rest of the people on board.
- The reports take some time to build initially and it's not overly intuitive.
September 28, 2019
Good data warehouse, but lacking some benefits
Looker is used as our main data warehouse and analytics system within our business. It is used across the entire organization and by every department. The business has a lot of data in a lot of different places so we feed a lot of that data into Looker to do segmentation, analysis and reporting throughout the entire business.
- Segmentation of users when feeding in product usage data.
- Segmentation of high value, medium value, and low-value customers based on financial data feeds.
- Giving everyone in the organization access to the same data for better collaboration and understanding.
- The "looks" can be difficult to create and understand.
- Seems to run slow in our environment. Takes a long time to load large data sets.
- Could come with more dashboard/graph capabilities depending on which data fields you're using.
September 28, 2019
Complex but powerful
We started using Looker about two years ago. The marketing department brought it on as a better way of analyzing data that was housed in disparate systems. Sales data in NetSuite. Call data in Cisco. Website traffic data in Google Analytics. Looker was brought on to consolidate the data under one roof and allow us to analyze and report on the data in a more centralized way.
- Bring in data from different systems.
- Allow users to drill into reports and view the underlying data.
- Combine reports into custom dashboards.
- Difficult to display data in custom formats.
- Data needs to join on a single key instead of just showing what you want.
- Overly complex with difficult learning curve.
September 28, 2019
Excellent Social Sharing & Reporting Platform
We use Looker to analyze leads data to determine billing, as well as the efficacy of our different referral paths and PPC efforts. I find it relatively easy to use once you learn the hierarchy of the system, and easy to manipulate on the fly when I need to pull data while I'm on the phone with a customer.
- Easily modify saved reports to highlight specific points of interest.
- Report across multiple clients, lead paths and referral objects.
- Save reports to come back to frequently visited reports for real time updates.
- It was definitely tricky getting started. However, once you learn how the system classifies and organizes, it gets a lot easier.
- Sometimes Looker takes too long to load, and as a result won't find the object you're looking for.
- Occasional run-ins with the spinning wheel of death.
September 18, 2019
Looker is the tool you're looking for... if you can afford it.
We're currently using Looker to peer into our own organization's internal data which is contained in our data warehouse. Looker is now used by everyone within our company in order to have operational insights across operations, finance, sales... all the way to the C-suite. We've been very impressed.
- It's on-demand and in the cloud, we don't have to mess with AMIs or scaling issues
- Looker's data domain creating tool is better than anything we've seen
- LookML, Looker's specialized language is incredibly extensible and allows us to connect and visualize almost any data type
- Looker is expensive
- Looker's solution is pretty much set, they come out with new features, but because it's hosted, you don't have a ton of extensibility
- Creating public dashboards seem a bit difficult
September 14, 2019
Power BI tool for enterprises
Looker is used company-wide, and it allows any analyst or business user to make smart decisions backed by data. Looker connects to all of our databases, be it AWS or GCP, and helps us to mash and analyze it in a single space.
- Email schedules for reports.
- Dashboard reporting.
- New and advanced charting, and analytical capabilities.
- It does very well with query optimization and displaying results.
- More charting colors and default scheme options.
September 13, 2019
A great tool that requires a ton of resources to deploy and maintain
Looker was being used by the entire organization. We also wanted to use Looker externally for our merchant dashboards, but that option turned out to be too expensive. We focused more on using it internally by our sales, finance, marketing, and engineering teams to build dashboards that we could use for internal analytics.
- We were able to create a data model that was consistent with all users.
- We were able to customize our dashboards to our needs.
- Very simple tasks are very complicated in Looker. It is complicated for users to be able to create their own calculation, as these measures have to be added to the data model.
- Very simple calculations are complicated to add to the data model.
August 09, 2019
Looker - taking a closer look at your organization!
We use Looker in just the administrative side of our organization rather than throughout the whole group. This is mainly due to the specific purpose of the software and also because it can be a little difficult to use for non-trained individuals. The best aspect of it is its ability to quickly share and present BI data to anyone.
- Great management of complex and large amounts of data.
- Stunning visuals.
- Easy sharing of products and results.
- Mobile version is not the same caliber as the full version.
- Usage can become complex when performing unusual processes.
- Loading data can sometimes take a while.
We use Looker across the whole organization, it is the main source of data for decision making. It addresses problems like tracking financial and other performance trends over time, alerting us about unusual data and basically modeling 80% of the business' data.
- It enables non-tech-savvy users to quickly put together their own dashboards and keep track of their metrics of interest.
- Safe development environment to test data models before launching, and version control through Github.
- Reporting flexibility in terms of filtering possibilities, metrics/dimension addition, and basic data transformation.
- Widen a bit more the range of graphing options.
- Allow sharing data more easily with non-Looker users without losing privacy.
- More debugging options for complex code to understand where in the SQL code errors are.
Our organization is using Looker to provide data access to the entire organization, build for scale, and to enable all departments to pull their own data.
- Able to connect to multiple different data sources
- Easy data filtering and navigation
- Clean visualizations and easy to download the data
- Looker lacks the ability to provide 'and' operators when filtering. Only 'or' is provided
- Looker lacks the ability to auto create a data dictionary for defined dimensions and measures within the software. A person must access the API to create one, which is rather inconvenient
- Looker lacks the ability to display descriptions on the Lookml Dashboard view, which is a list of dashboards where descriptions are not displayed