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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…
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Popular Features
- Customizable dashboards (92)8.787%
- Report sharing and collaboration (94)8.686%
- Drill-down analysis (91)8.282%
- Formatting capabilities (92)7.474%
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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?
- Setup fee required
For the latest information on pricing, visithttps://cloud.google.com/resources/look…
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- Free/Freemium Version
- Premium Consulting/Integration Services
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What is Looker?
Looker, Google Cloud’s business intelligence platform, enables users to chat with data. Organizations are given self-service and governed BI to build custom applications with trusted metrics, or to bring Looker modeling to their existing environment.
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 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 Video
The future of Looker is powered by generative AI—Google's vision for what's next in business intelligence
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
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 Report Delivery Scheduling and Multi-User Support (named login) highest, with a score of 8.9.
The most common users of Looker are from Mid-sized Companies (51-1,000 employees).
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Reviews and Ratings
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Reviews
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March 12, 2024
Looker: Cheap for what it delivers!
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
I use Looker to build analytical dash boards to provide data from different sources inside my organization. Presenting data with good visuals and dynamic data slicing and cross filtering so that the users can obtain insights from data
- 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
March 12, 2024
Using Looker as explorer for the last year
We use Looker as the visualization tool for the data of some of the SW applications we developed in the organization. It is used normally for those applications where Google Analytics information is available. We use it as a tool to share and visualize data but also to extract information to analyze it in other tools.
- 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
We use Looker to plug and play with other Google products, such as porting data from Search Console or Google Analytics, and even Google Sheets to join data sources. When GA4 launched, it became a lot more tricky for us to get visibility into the data we needed, so Looker was the ideal solution for us. We've created custom reports with dashboards and used templates readily available, which is a great plug-and-play option for setting up views quickly. It's also straightforward to do more complex things that we'd usually need Data Analysts to do in SQL, like joining data tables, because adding tags and categories to imported data with data joins is possible.
- 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.
March 11, 2024
Looker is the report engine for you!
We use Looker to track everything about marketing delivery, opens, clicks, and conversion tracking. This includes email, SMS, push, and external channels. This allows us to distribute this important information across the entire organization so that when someone needs the information, they have it immediately and without extra effort from the seats that are responsible for producing the content or managing the channels.
- Granular reporting.
- Ease of building.
- Ease of access.
- Needs training to be a builder.
- Needs training to be a user.
- Can get visually cluttered.
March 11, 2024
Integral, Awesome software
Looker is used throughout my organization, for reporting on a host of different areas including revenue tracking, ad request monitoring, campaign management/pacing, and traffic acquisition. We have scheduled email reports set up covering a plethora of different use cases, that are leveraged both internally and externally. Problems addressed include regular access to data, distributing information to stakeholders on a fixed cadence, and keeping different teams appraised of what is going on while mitigating the need for excessive meetings.
- 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.
March 11, 2024
Look no further than Looker!
I use Looker in my business for both business and marketing analytics, across a myriad of data sets and sources
- Cross reference
- Data analysis
- Data piping
- Highly complex, requires many hours to truly master
March 11, 2024
Great BI tool for data aggregation
We collect a lot of data within the company, but that data used to be spread out among multiple divisions and multiple (not interoperable ) systems within our organization, making it almost impossible to operate organization-wide data analysis.
Besides, most legacy systems within our organization required the users to have SQL hands on experience, which limited the number of people who could actually access and use the data.
Besides, most legacy systems within our organization required the users to have SQL hands on experience, which limited the number of people who could actually access and use the data.
- The response speed of the dashboards
- Seamless integration with Slack/Salesforce/Github etc.
- Visualizing the KPI metrics of multiple divisions in a unified dashboard
- Still room for improvement in terms of user interface
- Not so much room the customization
- Lack of documentation of some system errors
February 20, 2024
Deep dive into Looker
Looker is an amazing tool - we use Looker for creating Default/standard reports for our monthly reporting, weekly reports.
The business problems Looker helps to address
- Users with no experience of SQL or in particular, any coding or knowledge of machine language, extract data from different tables and retrieve the data needed by the user
- Creating and extracting data from customer/adhoch reports is super simple and user-friendly
The business problems Looker helps to address
- Users with no experience of SQL or in particular, any coding or knowledge of machine language, extract data from different tables and retrieve the data needed by the user
- Creating and extracting data from customer/adhoch reports is super simple and user-friendly
- The explore view of Looker saves the day - Creating adhoch reports is super simple
- Slicing, dicing and filtering data based on multiple parameters is super easy rather than writing complex SQL queries
- Adding fields, removing fields, changing layouts, minor alterations and joining tables to get the desired data is easier than ever
- People can save their own views for the next time - same base data can have N number of views based on users and fields
- Looker is less graphical or pictorial which makes it less attractive
- Consumes a lot of memory when there are multiple rows and columns, impacts performance too
- At times when we download huge chunks of raw data from Looker dashbords, the time taken to prepare the file is enormous - The user fails to understand if Looker has frozen or if the data is getting prepared in the background for downloading. In turn, user ends up triggering multiple downloads
September 18, 2023
Looker is a fantastic BI tool that scales with the business
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
December 23, 2022
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.
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
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
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
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
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.