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Looker

Looker

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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Pricing

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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…

Offerings

  • Free Trial
  • Free/Freemium Version
  • Premium Consulting/Integration Services

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SAP Crystal is an analytics and reporting software solution for SMBs. SAP Crystal comprises Crystal Reports for pixel-perfect reporting, and SAP Crystal Server for automated distribution and self-service access to reports, dashboards and data exploration.

What is SAP Lumira Discovery?

SAP Lumira Discovery is SAP’s data visualization and discovery application. It facilitates data discovery, visualization, and analysis by assisting users with creation of dashboards, infographics, presentations, data facets, tag clouds, and more.

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Product Demos

How To Use Looker as a Business User

YouTube
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Features

BI Standard Reporting

Standard reporting means pre-built or canned reports available to users without having to create them.

8
Avg 8.1

Ad-hoc Reporting

Ad-Hoc Reports are reports built by the user to meet highly specific requirements.

8.1
Avg 8.0

Report Output and Scheduling

Ability to schedule and manager report output.

8.5
Avg 8.3

Data Discovery and Visualization

Data Discovery and Visualization is the analysis of multiple data sources in a search for patterns and outliers and the ability to represent the data visually.

6.7
Avg 8.0

Access Control and Security

Access control means being able to determine who has access to which data.

8.3
Avg 8.5

Mobile Capabilities

Support for mobile devices like smartphones and tablets.

5.8
Avg 7.9
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Product Details

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 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

Screenshot of a Looker dashboard with a geo chart.

Looker Video

The future of Looker is powered by generative AI—Google's vision for what's next in business intelligence

Looker Technical Details

Deployment TypesOn-premise, Software as a Service (SaaS), Cloud, or Web-Based
Operating SystemsWindows, Linux, Mac
Mobile ApplicationNo
Supported CountriesUnited States, Canada, United Kingdom, Mexico, Germany, France, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Brazil
Supported LanguagesEnglish

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.

Domo, MicroStrategy Analytics, and Tableau Server are common alternatives for Looker.

Reviewers rate Report Delivery Scheduling 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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Comparisons

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Reviews From Top Reviewers

(1-5 of 57)

My look at Looker

Rating: 10 out of 10
August 18, 2015
Vetted Review
Verified User
Looker
1 year of experience
Looker is being used across the entire organization. The strategic and business areas use it to get an overview of several aspects, especially, revenue related. Marketing people use it a lot because of most of our campaigns are performance based. The content area uses it to see if they are doing things right (checking users' engagement). Although IT is not working with it, Looker frees resources from this department since most of queries were created by them.
  • Easy to set up and, at the same time, allows more control from administrators that really know what the data is
  • Very straightforward for end users
  • Support is very good: they answer very quickly
Cons
  • Some specific queries still are not supported or have to be done via some tweaks
  • I don't know if it is possible but I had a problem that I had to create several explorers with the same views depending on where the from clause is used. This is very confusing for end users: sometimes they don't know which Explorer they should use.
Looker performs well if there is someone with a technical background (SQL) and that knows about the data. If nobody who knows the data model knows how to create queries (especially to configure), the team will have a bad time configuring it.

A Look at Looker

Rating: 9 out of 10
August 18, 2015
Vetted Review
Verified User
Looker
1 year of experience
Looker is being used across all of Lyve. Looker allows our business users to explore the data in our data warehouse and answer business relevant questions. The Data Insights team are the primary users, defining the data model and providing dashboards and reports that provide simple answers for other users but more importantly act as "jumping off points" for other questions.
  • Looker is very good at answering "ad-hoc" questions once the data model is defined. A simple example for instance is when we show the number of users added to the system, we start with just the basic number, Looker makes it easy to explore from that starting point and ask other questions like "how many of those users were added in the last X days", or "how many of those users are on android versus ios."
  • Looker has a feature called "Persistent Derived Tables" (PDTs) which allows for highly analytical queries which may take a long time to execute against the raw data to be pre-computed and the results quickly available to end users.
  • Looker provides a lot of flexibility in how the data model is defined, you can start simply with individual tables from your data warehouse, but you can also define parts of the model based on SQL queries.
  • Beyond the technical aspects of the product, the Looker team has been very responsive to questions from my team, as well as to requests for new features (and the occasional discovered bug).
  • The evaluation process was very straightforward, we were able to use Looker against our own data and even begin the development of the data model during the evaluation, it gave us a real sense of how we could use for real use cases.
  • Looker has had multiple product updates in the few months we've been using the product, they seem to have a good steady cadence of adding new features, improving existing features and addressing existing shortcomings in each new release.
Cons
  • Looker needs some improvement in the visualization aspects of the product, they are very good at getting the data, but the choices for visualizing that data are somewhat limited, there are workarounds for some of the weaknesses but they tend to be labor intensive and fragile. For example, there is no way to define a custom color palette for use in our charts, we could define a set of colors on an individual graph and tie those colors to individual values, but it's more trouble than it's worth.
  • Looker dashboards are an area where the needs often exceed the capabilities of the product. The dashboard layouts are done with a drag-and-drop interface which is not very responsive, and we often wind up with a dashboard that is "good enough" rather than what we were aiming for. This isn't a show stopper for us as the data is all present, but it can be frustrating.
  • Looker does not provide a lot of feedback to users when it is processing data or even when there is a problem getting the data (possibly because of user/modeler error), you have to know to look for little spinning circles to see that it is still "thinking", or know that if a dashboard shows "No Data Available" that you have to dig deeper to find out what the actual problem is.
  • Looker allows you to explore a large amount of data, this is both good and bad, it's great because you can probably find whatever you're looking for, but on the flip side, it's easy for users to get lost or overwhelmed with the number of choices they are being given.
Looker works very well against Amazon's Redshift. Some of the questions I asked during a reference check with another customer:

* How much data are you storing in Redshift and querying with Looker?
* How large is your Redshift cluster?
* How is the performance of Looker against that cluster?
* How "real time" is the data? Do you add data on an ongoing basis or have more of a "traditional" ETL model where you update your data warehouse once a day?
* How large a team do you have working with Looker? How many people are authoring LookML versus just exploring the data?
* What if anything were you using before Looker?
* What's the one thing about Looker you know now that you wish you knew before making the decision?

Looker - taking a closer look at your organization!

Rating: 8 out of 10
August 09, 2019
SB
Vetted Review
Verified User
Looker
3 years of experience
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.
Cons
  • 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.
Looker is an excellent option for managing and displaying complex business data without too much hassle or waiting. This ability allows us to quickly understand trends and statistics, but it should not be used for in-depth statistical analysis. It is a great first stop when looking at data, but other software should be used for further research.

Excellent tool with impeccable support team!

Rating: 9 out of 10
May 14, 2021
JP
Vetted Review
Verified User
Looker
1 year of experience
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
Cons
  • Can be slow at times
  • Takes a lot of upfront investment.
  • Better on the go and mobile tools.
I would definitely recommend [Looker] for anyone. It is a great way to visualize data. I have also heard of people using Tableau, and I have used a little myself, but I definitely think Looker is easy to use.

Awesome software for our team

Rating: 8 out of 10
May 08, 2021
ET
Vetted Review
Verified User
Looker
1 year of experience
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.
Cons
  • Can be slow at times.
  • The set up initially can be tough.
  • Customizing visualization could be improved.
I would definitely recommend this tool for almost any company. You can create a company dashboard that shows all of your important numbers in one place for everyone to be able to view.
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