Filter Ratings and Reviews
Filter 123 vetted Looker reviews and ratings
Reviews (1-25 of 53)
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 27, 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 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.
October 03, 2019
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.
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
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.
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 27, 2019
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)
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 have Looker available as an opt-in app for the whole enterprise. It is our self-service business intelligence tool. Our power users create a dashboard and scheduled reports for others to view. This tool allows us to see many of our non-financial metrics in a multi-dimensional manner (vs two-dimensional spreadsheets).
- Beautiful visualizations.
- No advanced coding needed to manage (users can drag and drop).
- Easy to learn, mostly intuitive with basic training.
- Mobile viewing is HTML based, not always highly viewable.
- Basic operations can be difficult to achieve. There is a function called table calculations which allows this.
- Running on a single server, the entire instance can slow down if even one user schedules a large dashboard.
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
Looker is being used by one department. Currently, it is being used for viewing internal data but it is being tested for a rollout to clients.
- The modeling layer adds flexibility to how we can manipulate data before we show it.
- Easy to connect to Snowflake.
- Drill down feature is useful.
- Could use the drill down feature to another chart instead of a table.
- Navigation from explores to dashboard is cumbersome.
- Need richer pivot features: hide certain pivot columns from charts.
December 08, 2018
Looker - Business intelligence tool
Looker is being used by specific areas of our organization. Our organization is too huge for it to be used throughout. Looker greatly helps in personalizing dashboards and setting up integrated reports for our organization. These reports are created from various data streams and sources. It has various usages and overall has an excellent visual. It helps organizations perform GAP analysis and look at big data in a small view.
- Excellent visualizations.
- Support for desktop as well as mobile.
- Integration with different data sources.
- It is very expensive and it is not for small teams. The tool is only relevant for large teams.
- There are not a lot of training opportunities or documentation available.
- Customization of visualizations is sometimes difficult.
November 16, 2018
Easy to use!
[It's] Used by multiple departments across the whole organization. It allows people to quickly view complex data, and share it with others. Easier to use than Tableau.
- Visualization, easy manipulation.
- Business leaders do not need-- nor do they want-- to write SQL to get the data and then visualize it.
- Graphs and spaces that can be shared with other users.
- Little pop overs or tips that appear as you hover mouse over an object.
June 18, 2018
Solution to analyze your data quickly and safely
This tool is being used in some departments of the company that perform calculations and data analysis, for business intelligence, helps the work team to perform analysis for decision making of large projects, it is very easy to use the graphics are great and very understandable, the filter options are very good and allows you to delve into the data, the visualizations are quite friendly and very practical
- Filters that help to perform a deeper analysis
- Detailed data analysis
- It saves time when presenting works
- You get fast results
- Sometimes it takes to load the information
- The calculation field is advantageous, but not intuitive
- They should be able to accept many more databases
- For some people, it is usually very cumbersome
- Some of its functions are somewhat limited
May 28, 2018
Looker - 2 Thumbs Up
Looker is being used across our department to analyze how our representatives are doing metric wise. We attempt to identify any issues as they arise and this helps for us to rectify any pain points across the team. It gives us a great way to analyze all the data that we collect and make sure that it is meaningful overall.
- Easy to use (I was able to pick it up without too much training.)
- The presentation of the data is easy to interpret
- Getting frequent reports is easy to setup
- I would not necessarily say it is a con but it is a VAST tool so there might be features you may overlook
May 18, 2018
Using Looker in a Custom Integration
We built a custom integration with Looker that auto-generates dashboards and visualizations from data that our platform accumulates. Because of this custom integration, we are often limited in our options on how we use the platform and what cool Looker tools we can use as well. Additionally, this integration has our clients interacting with Looker and they are often unimpressed and frustrated by how technical the platform is as well as the speed. Our integration and what we allow them to do and see could be a contributing factor in this so please keep that in mind as you read the rest of my review.
- Incredibly advanced analytics tool that is even more capable if you learn how to use LookML which is Looker's custom programming language.
- Quick access to the raw data that is being visualized allows you to spot check for data integrity.
- My usage with Looker is limited because of our integration but, having seen their updates over time, the integrations with Slack, Salesforce, and other tools appear to greatly improve organizations' workflows.
- The time it takes to load data has been INCREDIBLY frustrating to our clients. How much of this is the fault of our developers, I don't know. What I do know is that it's the slowest time to see a visualization of any BI tool I've used. By far.
- There is A LOT of exerting setup required for custom dashboards. When adding our custom integration into the mix it's been nearly impossible to get things done.
- The calculation field can be incredibly useful but, again, requires technical expertise which not all of our users have.
June 15, 2018
Looker is awesome!
Looker is used at our company across many departments for advanced reporting on performance and data analysis.
- Powerful dashboards with preset information.
- Easy to use for novices using the GUI but with advanced options for power users.
- Excellent support.
- Report caching can sometimes lag behind fairly significantly.
December 28, 2017
Looker is disrupting the BI marketplace
Looker is being used across all of Heroku. It is used in all the major departments, such as Sales, Marketing, Product, Engineering, Customer support and Finance. It provides customer insight to all areas of the company.
- Real time dashboards
- Guided Navigation, meaning you can bring up a dashboard or report, click on a cell and drill into the foundational data.
- Central Metadata Management. LookML metadata repository and language is a game changer.
- Better visualizations. 3d graphs and charts. A little more sex and sizzle.
- Adding a new data source and/or tables should be easier.
December 07, 2017
Looker supports data self-serve - everyone can use it!
Every team in TransferWise is using Looker which means that more than half the company is using it regularly. Our teams are formed to be independent and there is no central BI team to support them with analytics and this is why we use Looker. It helps us to dig into data and draw conclusions based on data real-time. Teams use it to monitor their key performing indicators and build dashboards to present data. Some teams also use Looker for operational work.
- Build it once - The reason why we have so many Looker users in TransferWise is because it is easy and fast to use. If tables have imported and modeled then everyone can quickly pick the fields and run they query.
- Simple - average users don't need to know SQL or have technical skills to use Looker.
- Automated reporting - Looker allows you to schedule emails for daily/weekly/monthly reports or send alerts if there are anomalies in data.
- Missing some more advanced visualization options, for example Trellis Line Graph
December 06, 2017
Looker's great if you're looking for a customizable solution for making data available to your team
We use Looker to make clean data available to the rest of the company. Empowering teams with data in a quick and reliable way with as much of the technical nuances removed. It's an easy way to reduce reliance on the analytics team and make reporting as real-time as possible.
- Customizing your build -- Fields and measures can represent whatever you want it to.
- Transparency -- Everything is translated to SQL in real-time so you know what's going on in the background.
- Innovation -- There's a monthly update where new features are regularly released.
- User Management and Sharing Data could be a little easier. Your entire model needs to be built with user permissions in mind.
- It's not quite as plug 'n play as the alternatives, but that's okay.
- Visualizations could be improved for large amounts of data.
- Date reporting could be improved. Date, week, hour, month, etc are separate fields...you can't quickly shift between them in reporting/visualizations.
Looker Scorecard Summary
Feature Scorecard Summary
About Looker
Looker Screenshots
Looker Competitors
Pricing
- Has featureFree Trial Available?Yes
- Does not have featureFree or Freemium Version Available?No
- Has featurePremium Consulting/Integration Services Available?Yes
- Entry-level set up fee?No
Looker Support Options
| Free Version | Paid Version | |
|---|---|---|
| Live Chat | ||
| Forum/Community | ||
| FAQ/Knowledgebase | ||
| Video Tutorials / Webinar |
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 |