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%
Reviewer Pros & Cons
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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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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.
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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
(1-25 of 49)Companies can't remove reviews or game the system. Here's why
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 you scale easily and have great security so you don't need to use any other service to protect your data. Also it primarily excels at data driven or data intensive task and since the introduction of AI a few months back, most of it has gotten automatic and requires less manual intervention. Finally it integrates really well with other products and supports a lot of plugins which makes it a lot more easier to work with it. And even if you have any problem with it, you can always contact their customer support.
- Helps us reduce overall cost and scale easily.
- Excels at data driven tasks and can automate most of the tasks using AI.
- Supports several useful plugins and can be easily integrated with other products.
- The platform itself is great but the dashboard or website is very slow and takes quite a while to load.
- No other problem with the website or the platform itself.
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
March 15, 2024
A deeper look into Looker.
We have Looker in place to view all of the usage data and metrics to track our customers' usage patterns. It is a vital tool that we can use to generate alerts highlighting an urgent need to upgrade or take action on the account. It is a lifesaver for CSMs and Salespeople, as without this, we would be completely blindsided.
- 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.
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.
March 13, 2024
Invaluable and Intuitive Data Analysis and Visualization
I use Looker to provide daily insights into marketing performance at each of our individual channels, including traffic, revenue, costs, and detailed trends on YoY, WoW, and general sequential information. I use Looker to create dashboards frequently to help answer specific marketing questions.
- 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
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
As an digital agency, we report to our clients on daily basis. Our clients demand comprehensive, understandable, and actionable insights into their marketing campaigns. Traditional reporting tools can be cumbersome and not flexible enough. Looker allows us to create customized, interactive reports and dashboards that clients can explore, helping them understand their campaign performance at a glance. Looker offers a practical solution for creating interactive marketing reports and data visualizations.
- 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
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
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
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
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.
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
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 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
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 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.