Top Notch Looker
We use Looker to locate accounts, access data history for players and various things. These include wallet history, redemption history, a …
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 (94)8.888%
- Report sharing and collaboration (95)8.686%
- Drill-down analysis (92)8.282%
- Formatting capabilities (93)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 Trial
- Free/Freemium Version
- Premium Consulting/Integration Services
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How To Use Looker as a Business User
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Product Details
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- Tech Details
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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).
Comparisons
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Reviews and Ratings
(377)Attribute Ratings
Reviews
(51-75 of 97)Companies can't remove reviews or game the system. Here's why
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 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.
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 17, 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
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.
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.
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 20, 2017
Look No Further
We use Looker to build dashboards to serve each area of the business: clinical, financial, marketing, and supply chain.
- The granular permissions sets allow a large amount of control over what users can see and do.
- Views, models, and (optionally) dashboards are version-controlled and stored in a git repo of your choosing. This is indispensable for having peace of mind when performing large refactors.
- Incredible customer support offered conveniently via live chat within the app. Feature requests are always taken seriously and you can check back anytime to see where it is in the queue.
- Option to implement custom D3 visualizations.
- There could be more stock visualizations.
- The delineation between user-defined dashboards and LookML-defined dashboards is confusing and disjointed.
December 12, 2017
Dynamic and Realtime Dashboards
Looker is one of the best tools for monitoring dashboards and report generations. It is used widely over the organization. It helped to migrate from the legacy email reports to dynamic dashboards and report creation.
Business Analytics and higher management heavy rely on looker for the trend of sales, expenses and many other use cases.
Business Analytics and higher management heavy rely on looker for the trend of sales, expenses and many other use cases.
- Helps to dynamically create filters.
- Easy user interface.
- Can connect to multiple datasources with ease.
- Representation of data in different formats : graphs, stats.
- Can share the looks to different teams and assign appropriate permissions for individual look.
- Can include multiple looks within one single dashboard.
- Creates cache data in the internal looker DB which consumes much space. Would be great if it has some garbage collection technique.
- 2 Factor authentication to user login will add more value to its security.
- Would be great to download the looks and send through an email.
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
November 03, 2017
A BI Tool that is powerful and Easy to Use
The Analytics team at my business uses Looker as a reporting tool for Business Intelligence. Looker allows my team to automate reporting. These reports are then used across the whole organisation by various teams. Although other teams do not directly deal with Looker, their functioning certainly depends on the great features that Looker offers.
- Automation of reports.
- Easy drag and drop interface for most functionalities.
- Great variety of reporting options.
- Works well with large data in terms of performance.
- Setting up looker is quite tedious.
- It takes a considerable amount of time to get handy with the features on Looker .
- Need to configure database separately every time you want to connect a new database.
April 15, 2016
Looker - The Perfect Business Data Analytics Provider
Looker is a powerful self-service business intelligence tool that is focused on solving particular problems. The first time I noticed about Looker, was when this startup was been nominated for best data analytics startup. The reason why we love the service is it has been familiar to work with navigating through a web browser and it operates on any device at any time. Looker's analytics tool brings data and business teams together to develop the business to the next level.
- Teamwork.
- Git for version management and collaboration.
- Powerful SQL modeling ability.
- Should lower the price.
- A bit hard to use the service if you are a newbie.
- Should give more demonstrations.
March 14, 2016
The Best BI User Experience
Looker helps us democratize data around 10+ product lines and 4 functions.
We have Looker connected to multiple product databases (PostgreSQL, MySQL) and to a data warehouse (Redshift).
Currently have over 50 internal active users of Looker.
We have Looker connected to multiple product databases (PostgreSQL, MySQL) and to a data warehouse (Redshift).
Currently have over 50 internal active users of Looker.
- I believe that among BI tools, Looker provides the best balance between flexibility and configurability for the data team, ease of deployment and support for dev ops and great user experience for the end users – consumers of data.
- The data modeling layer, LookML proved to be extremely helpful for the Data team to define data models and abstract end users – data consumers – away from the complexity of underlying data sets.
- Documentation is clear, comprehensive and easy to find.
- Live chart support within the Looker interface is very helpful.
- Powerful permission management system allows to provide access to multiple data sets to a big number of users without the risk of compromising security.
- Very easy to deploy: is shipped as a standalone server Java application. Or even better: can be hosted by Looker company.
- Add the ability to perform joins across physically distributed databases