Looker can help you cut costs and easily scale your business
Looker is used by many developers and businesses and reason why so many people use it is because it can help you to cut overall cost, help …
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
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- Free Trial
- 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).
Comparisons
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Reviews and Ratings
(376)Attribute Ratings
Reviews
(1-25 of 70)Companies can't remove reviews or game the system. Here's why
March 25, 2024
User experience on Looker
I use Looker for data manipulation, data sorting, and analysis based on business needs. Predicting future sales and cycle times of machines We also use Looker for report-making and data presentation. We deal with huge gear data based on part numbers from multiple factories around the globe, so Looker helps us manipulate data for analysis purposes from multiple factories in a short period of time.
- data analytics for huge data from multiple factories.
- Integration with other software for data transfer for analysis purpose
- variety of dashboards with interactive visualizations, filters helps us to get great insights.
- Support team takes time to resolve issue.
- Learning cost is high
- training materials and documentation is not easily available for learning
Some stakeholders use Looker to help visualise data that has been made available to them as part of our 'DaaP' programme (data as a product). The simple and intuitive nature allows simple connection to our data warehouse, native/cache'd querying, dynamic visuals, and an abstraction/semantic layer to sit between raw/modelled data and visulisation.
- Semantic layer
- Dynamic visualisations
- Intuitive design
- Can be slow at times
- Some features locked behind pricing tiers
- Semantic layer requires additional knowledge to use to full extent
March 19, 2024
Not the most advanced option; great value for the price
We use it to be able to see how many student registrations we have at any given point in time. It allows team members to have access to their relevant portion of the data without having access to the raw data set. Multiple people need to see what the registration counts are so they can prepare materials and Looker lets us do that securely. We essentially use it as a lens for the raw data.
- Formatting
- Querying
- Security
- Graphics
- Visual builder
- User Interface
- Training and Documentation
- Video tutorials
- Support
We use Looker very frequently as they can provide a number of data options, such as charts and graphs and scalability which meets our needs perfectly. Also their range of useful characteristics includes cost control, AL and ML and security emphasis which can increase your overall business productivity and efficiency. So if your company wants to maximize its productivity and efficiency, this is the way to go.
- 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.
Our main use case is to prepare dashboards showing the status of our internal work queue based on a Google Sheet that contains all the queue elements. We show graphs and KPIs such as the number of elements, the number of elements that exceeded a certain number of days, the average number of days to close them, the distribution across the different subteams, and the distribution per status.
- 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).
March 13, 2024
Looker Studio web based report maker.
At our organization, we leverage Locker Studio to facilitate the aggregation of data from multiple sources and automate the generation of a wide range of reports. The implementation of Locker Studio enhances our ability to efficiently compile and analyze large datasets, resulting in timely and accurate reporting across various business functions.
- Connect to multiple data sources.
- Automated data aggregations.
- Automated data segmentation.
- With larger data sets it slows down.
Looker is used as a primary data visualization tool at the company. We not only use it for internal reporting but we also expose the dashboards and reports within our product that is provided to our customers. It has met if not exceed nearly all of the expectations we were looking for when it came to a data visualization tool.
- Dashboards and Reports
- Logical Separation of Data Fields and Measures
- Tailored Report and Data Delivery
- Customizing Data Schedule
- Complex Query Building
- Lack of Documentation
March 12, 2024
Super Tool to intelligently manage Data Representation!!
Looker helps to create a very representative dashboards. It helps to visualize to much of data points on any webpage or any Instant messaging software which we use. It helps us to share details to the large audience at a time. Due to fast and easy configuration of the visualization of the data it helps to achieve more productivity.
- Data Visualization
- Sharing of Reports
- Sync with multiple data points
- Content Management
- Robust nature
- Need more developer options to user
March 12, 2024
A very good BI software with a soft learning curve
Looker is a powerful data analytics tool that in our company is both used internally - for tasks like workforce performance management, specific profitability of a contract and financial audit in general - and "sold" to our customer. "Sold" is quoted because it's not just a matter of licensing: selling this product means also teaching how to use it because of its almost infinite customization capabilities.
- 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
March 12, 2024
Looker - Flexible but Not Intuitive
We use Looker for data analytics with our engineers and product teams, to better understand our speed and accuracy that our APIs provide to our customers. We are also using Looker to determine error messaging for when our APIs fail so that we can fix these errors.
- 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
March 12, 2024
A fantastic solution for small and medium businesses to quickly get reporting up and customized to your liking
I use Looker as a way to analyze web performance over time as well as quickly and easily compare performance monthly across various channels. Every website i manage is setup with Looker with the data coming in automatically and then the insights included for each major call out for easy client viewing.
- 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
March 12, 2024
Good product, a bit pricey!
We use Looker business-wide for employees to gain insight on marketing and user acquisition as well as user behavior and metrics such as ROAS, LTV, retention, attrition, etc. We also use Looker for more high-level monitoring regarding daily revenue, costs, net revenue, and projections. We have differing levels of granularity in our visualizations and employees are free to create their own Looks aside from the main Dashboards and KPIs I prepare as Head of BI.
- Visualization
- Version Control.
- Organization
- Customer Support.
- Error Handling/Reporting.
- Pricing
March 12, 2024
Great tool for advanced users.
We use Looker to create dashboards and calculations for other tools, such as our CRM platforms. Looker imports our analytics tools from Google and other sources to flawlessly visualize them and later embed them into shareable dashboards that can then be accessed by clients, internal staff, and partners.
- 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.
March 12, 2024
Looker Review.
Looker is a business intelligence application with an analytics-oriented application server that sits on top of relational data stores. We use Looker for creating monthly reports. Additionally, it helps to provide a friendly interface for non-experienced users, integrate data, and manage data easily for DBs, data analytics, and many other tasks.
- Simple interface.
- Helps users with no SQL experience.
- Easy to integrate.
- Scalability for large data.
- Time for import large amount of data.
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
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
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.