Overview
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…
Great reporting tool
A deeper look into Looker.
When it comes to data visualization, Looker is an excellent and flexible platform.
Looker: easy, quick, and very well integrated with Google Sheets.
Looker Studio web based report maker.
Invaluable and Intuitive Data Analysis and Visualization
The perfect data visualization tool for Google Suite users
Looker saves us dozens of hours every moth and puts data into perspective
Should be better but is still growing
An easy way to show complex data
Super Tool to intelligently manage Data Representation!!
A very good BI software with a soft learning curve
Looker - Flexible but Not Intuitive
A fantastic solution for small and medium businesses to quickly get reporting up and customized to your liking
Awards
Products that are considered exceptional by their customers based on a variety of criteria win TrustRadius awards. Learn more about the types of TrustRadius awards to make the best purchase decision. More about TrustRadius Awards
Popular Features
- Customizable dashboards (87)8.989%
- Drill-down analysis (86)8.787%
- Report sharing and collaboration (89)8.484%
- Formatting capabilities (87)6.767%
Reviewer Pros & Cons
Pricing
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.
Entry-level set up fee?
- No setup fee
Offerings
- Free Trial
- Free/Freemium Version
- Premium Consulting/Integration Services
Would you like us to let the vendor know that you want pricing?
98 people also want pricing
Alternatives Pricing
What is SAP Crystal?
SAP Crystal is an analytics and reporting software solution for SMBs. SAP Crystal comprises Crystal Reports for pixel-perfect reporting, and SAP Crystal Server for automated distribution and self-service access to reports, dashboards and data exploration.
What is SAP Lumira Discovery?
SAP Lumira Discovery is SAP’s data visualization and discovery application. It facilitates data discovery, visualization, and analysis by assisting users with creation of dashboards, infographics, presentations, data facets, tag clouds, and more.
Product Demos
How To Use Looker as a Business User
Features
BI Standard Reporting
Standard reporting means pre-built or canned reports available to users without having to create them.
- 6.6Pixel Perfect reports(73) Ratings
Pixel Perfect reports are highly-formatted reports with graphics and ability to preview the report before printing.
- 8.9Customizable dashboards(87) Ratings
Customizable dashboards are dashboards providing the builder some degree of control over the look and feel and display options.
- 7.6Report Formatting Templates(72) Ratings
Ad-hoc Reporting
Ad-Hoc Reports are reports built by the user to meet highly specific requirements.
- 8.7Drill-down analysis(86) Ratings
Drill down analysis is the ability to get to a further level of detail by going deeper into the hierarchy.
- 6.7Formatting capabilities(87) Ratings
Ability to format output e.g. conditional formatting, lines, headers, footers.
- 7.5Integration with R or other statistical packages(34) Ratings
Integration with the open-source R predictive modeling environment.
- 8.4Report sharing and collaboration(89) Ratings
Report sharing and collaboration is the ability to easily share reports with others.
Report Output and Scheduling
Ability to schedule and manager report output.
- 8.4Publish to Web(71) Ratings
- 8.7Publish to PDF(75) Ratings
- 8.7Report Versioning(57) Ratings
Report versioning is the assignment of version numbers to each version of a report to help in tracking.
- 8.8Report Delivery Scheduling(78) Ratings
Report Delivery Schedule is the ability to have reports delivered to a destination at a specific data and time.
Data Discovery and Visualization
Data Discovery and Visualization is the analysis of multiple data sources in a search for patterns and outliers and the ability to represent the data visually.
- 8.2Pre-built visualization formats (heatmaps, scatter plots etc.)(84) Ratings
Pre-built visualization formats are canned visualization types that can be selected to visualize different kinds of data.
- 8.3Location Analytics / Geographic Visualization(73) Ratings
Location analytics is the visualization of geographical or spatial data.
- 4.6Predictive Analytics(6) Ratings
Predictive Analytics is the ability to build forecasting models based on existing data sets.
Access Control and Security
Access control means being able to determine who has access to which data.
- 8.3Multi-User Support (named login)(82) Ratings
Named model access means that users have access based on name and password.
- 8Role-Based Security Model(75) Ratings
Role-based access means that access to data is determined by job or position in the corporation.
- 7.8Multiple Access Permission Levels (Create, Read, Delete)(80) Ratings
Multiple access permission levels means that different levels of users have different rights.
- 8.2Report-Level Access Control(22) Ratings
Report-level access control means that the type of report determines who has access to it.
Mobile Capabilities
Support for mobile devices like smartphones and tablets.
- 6.4Responsive Design for Web Access(59) Ratings
Web design aimed at producing easy-to-read sites across a range of different devices.
- 5Mobile Application(1) Ratings
A dedicated app for iOS and/or Android.
- 4.6Dashboard / Report / Visualization Interactivity on Mobile(53) Ratings
In-app dashboard reports and data visualization.
Product Details
- About
- Competitors
- Tech Details
- FAQs
What is Looker?
Looker vs. Looker Studio
Looker Studio is a part of Google's Looker Suite for business intelligence. Looker Studio is a self-serve BI solution where less technical users can create charts and reports, while Looker is a complete, enterprise BI platform, where technical users can build complex models that consider every aspect of the business. Looker Studio offers both free and pro versions, while Looker is not available for free. Looker and Looker Studio integrate with each other to support both types of analysis at businesses.
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 Competitors
Looker Technical Details
Deployment Types | On-premise, Software as a Service (SaaS), Cloud, or Web-Based |
---|---|
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
Comparisons
Compare with
Reviews and Ratings
(376)Attribute Ratings
Reviews
(1-25 of 89)Nice and easy to use solution!
- Integration with numerous datas ources
- Not steep learning curve, anyone with less tech knowledge can work on that
- Compatible with GA for Firebase
- Good functionalities for visual exploratory data analysis
- Variety of visualisations
- Colour codings are not intuitive
- More finetuning for visualizations needed (Like PowerBI)
Great reporting tool
- Blending sources
- Charts variety
- Access management
- It’s a bit laggy
- Some charts are limited
- You can’t create relationships between data sources
A deeper look into Looker.
- Usage dashboards.
- Alerts on action needed.
- Overview of the adoption.
- The platform is very slow in general.
- It's not very intuitive.
- Making dashboards on looker is a hard task.
- Offers numerous data options and scalability.
- Can increase productivity and efficiency with greater cost control.
- Can easily customize your data.
- Data migrating or uploading time could be reduced.
- Managing large number of users can easily become very tough to handle.
- No other downside.
- 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.
- I’d like a bit more personalization, particularly in the “Style” section (e.g., fonts, paragraph settings, the ability to map the axis labels to shorter names…).
- Performance can be quite slow when there are many graphs on one page, even making the page unresponsive sometimes.
- I’d love to be able to easily embed a dashboard in the Google Sheets it comes from (without injecting code to embed the HTML).
Looker Studio web based report maker.
- Connect to multiple data sources.
- Automated data aggregations.
- Automated data segmentation.
- With larger data sets it slows down.
Invaluable and Intuitive Data Analysis and Visualization
- Summarizes data in easy-to-interpret visuals
- Simplifies the process of compiling and comparing data points
- Enables bespoke calculations alongside raw data to improve understanding
- Manual, bespoke calculations language is complex and can make it challenging to do simple calculations
- Charts/tables can be inflexible or challenging to tailor to the exact view you are looking for
- Challenging to see all of the available data points given how the side navigation is structured
- Dashboards and Reports
- Logical Separation of Data Fields and Measures
- Tailored Report and Data Delivery
- Customizing Data Schedule
- Complex Query Building
- Lack of Documentation
- Easy to learn
- Hundreds of data connectors, including community connectors
- Free to use
- Resource (CPU/RAM/network) heavy
- Price of advanced connectors
- No mobile app
- Reporting multichannel and complex campaigns
- Medium to large data driven projects
- Google ecosystem data projects (Google Analytics, Big Querry, Google Ads and more)
Not so well suited for:
- Small projects with only one marketing channel
- Huge projects with heavy streaming needs
Should be better but is still growing
Moreover we are centralizing trusted metrics across teams and applications. Deployoing and test changes to metrics with confidence and enable collaboration with unified measurement, connected to business intelligence software.
- Self-service business intelligence for everyone
- Data modeling to unify business metrics
- Embeds analytics and applications
- Data plotting issues
- Somehow missing connection to data source
- Often shows data set configurations error
An easy way to show complex data
- statistics visualization
- creating thematic dashboards
- permissions management
- it offers many possibilities, but is not easy to use from the first visit
Super Tool to intelligently manage Data Representation!!
- Data Visualization
- Sharing of Reports
- Sync with multiple data points
- Content Management
- Robust nature
- Need more developer options to user
A very good BI software with a soft learning curve
- Real time data aggregation
- Very large data source connection pool
- Querying data can be as simple as a filter, up to LookML
- The default user interface is very spartan
- If you don't use BigQuery, some queries can be slow
- LookML can be daunting
Looker - Flexible but Not Intuitive
- Looker has high bandwidth and can process a lot of information quickly
- Looker is relatively easy to understand as a non technical staff
- Looks provides a lot of flexibility to integrate with our APIs
- Looker isn't build friendly with non engineering staff
- Looker crashes occasionally
- Looker could have a better looking UI
A fantastic solution for small and medium businesses to quickly get reporting up and customized to your liking
- Automation
- API coverage
- Integration of many different data sources
- Customization
- Ease of use
- Data uptime (portions go out frequently)
- Help articles and resources are lacking
- Learning curve is steep
Good product, a bit pricey!
- Visualization
- Version Control.
- Organization
- Customer Support.
- Error Handling/Reporting.
- Pricing
Great tool for advanced users.
- Perfect integration into other dashboarding platforms.
- Pulls data from multiple sources.
- Integrates with our Hubspot CRM.
- Finicky user interface.
- Pretty extensive learning curve.
- Would love to see a seamless integration of UA and GA4 together.
- Data Visualization.
- Custom Performance Reporting Dashboard.
- Performance Analysis.
- Blending Cross-Channel Data.
- Troubleshooting Data Errors.
- Properly Ensuring Data Validation/Accuracy.
- Inconsistent Custom Data Filtering Options.
Looker Review.
- Simple interface.
- Helps users with no SQL experience.
- Easy to integrate.
- Scalability for large data.
- Time for import large amount of data.
Looker: Cheap for what it delivers!
- Visually good graphical representations
- Data combination tool
- Native data integration with google products (ads, analytics, etc)
- Fully real-time collaborative
- Lacks a native data wrangling tool
- few options for visuals customization
- few native connectors with external sources
- Excel Online Connector
Using Looker as explorer for the last year
- Integration with some solutions
- Easy data extractation
- Easy to build visuals
- It is too difficult for simple use cases
- User experience is not intuitive enough for explorers
- Integrations with other visualization tools from other companies can improve
- Easy to set up.
- Shareable and end-user ease of use.
- Data joining is a particular highlight for tagging up URLs.
- Plug and play in many cases.
- Menus and navigation for set up can be a bit confusing for first time users.
- Add the ability to manually change the canvas size rather than setting it in pixels, which is counterintuitive.
Looker is the report engine for you!
- Granular reporting.
- Ease of building.
- Ease of access.
- Needs training to be a builder.
- Needs training to be a user.
- Can get visually cluttered.
Integral, Awesome software
- Filtering - you can filter across different dimensions and metrics to get a more specific "cut" of data
- Refreshing - data automatically ingests into Looker which allows reports to be updated and backfilled in real time
- Conditional Reporting - you can leverage Looker's reporting features to flag when a given metric or KPI falls below or above a specified threshold. For example, if you had a daily sales benchmark in a SAAS organization, you could use Looker to flag whenever daily sales falls above or below the benchmark
- Filtering - while the filter-ability of Looker is quite robust, the feature can be quite inconsistent. For example, sometimes you have to refresh a Look several times to get a filter to register all available options
- Row Limit - while it happens infrequently, it may be the case that you need to export a dataset that is comprised of over 5,000 rows. Looker can be a bit finicky in this case, as you are unable to export over that amount, which means you would need to export the data in multiple sets, increasing the likelihood of duplicate rows
- Data delay - sometimes the timing around data refreshes can be very inconsistent, so it can be difficult to guarantee a Look refreshing correctly at a specified time.
Less Appropriate: Explore models can quickly become dysfunctional and slow. One area for improvement is some kind of recommendation system to say "make these tweaks to your Explore to avoid errors with loading time."
Look no further than Looker!
- Cross reference
- Data analysis
- Data piping
- Highly complex, requires many hours to truly master