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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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Learn from top reviewers

Top Notch Looker

Rating: 9 out of 10
March 20, 2025
IncentivizedVetted ReviewVerified User
We use Looker to locate accounts, access data history for players and various things. These include wallet history, redemption history, a player history search, a details page...
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Verified user
Analyst
Looker2 years of experience

Fully recommend Looker

Rating: 9 out of 10
February 27, 2025
IncentivizedVetted ReviewVerified User
Looker is a core part of our organization’s data strategy, enabling dashboards and reporting for all aspects of our business. We leverage Looker to transform raw data into act...
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Verified user
Manager
Looker4 years of experience

Pretty good BI tool with amazing resource efficiency

Rating: 9 out of 10
February 11, 2025
IncentivizedVetted ReviewVerified User
Dashboards and Analytics, we use it as complete BI tool sharing dashboards with internal and external stakeholders along with analytics usage of the team. Its also easier to d...
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Verified user
Analyst
Looker4 years of experience

Looker is an under-appreciated tool that can do wonders for your business

Rating: 8 out of 10
February 7, 2025
IncentivizedVetted ReviewVerified User
Looker is our go-to tool for reporting on all the users' data in our platforms. We use it to get instantaneous information about specific aspects in each platform, and we also...
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Mahmoud Diab
Consultant - Customer Service
Technical and Customer Support Specialist
Advocacy Maven
Looker4 years of experience

Looker Software Review.

Rating: 9 out of 10
February 6, 2025
IncentivizedVetted ReviewVerified User
It's a good tool to have your dashboard and visualize your data, total active clients, and the total achieved this quarter and year. Also, you can visualize your prospects by ...
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Verified user
Account Manager
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Awards

Products that are considered exceptional by their customers based on a variety of criteria win TrustRadius awards. Learn more about the types of TrustRadius awards to make the best purchase decision. More about TrustRadius Awards

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Pricing

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Looker

Looker

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Unavailable

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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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 8.2

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 7.9

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 Competitors

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

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(1-5 of 95)

Good data warehouse, but lacking some benefits

Rating: 6 out of 10
Incentivized
September 28, 2019
Verified User
Manager in Marketing
Computer Software Company, 51-200 employees
Vetted Review
Verified User
Looker
2 years of experience
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
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.
Pros
  • 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.
Cons
  • 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.
Likelihood to Recommend
Looker seems to be great if you have data from a lot of sources and need to keep it in a single place. However, there seem to be problems when integrating it with Salesforce and sometimes it can be very slow to load. However, if you are just looking for a data warehouse plain and simple, it will do the job.

Great user to use product that can be rolled out to the whole org

Rating: 10 out of 10
Incentivized
May 21, 2019
Verified User
Director in Finance and Accounting
Internet Company, 201-500 employees
Vetted Review
Verified User
Looker
3 years of experience
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
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).
Pros
  • Beautiful visualizations.
  • No advanced coding needed to manage (users can drag and drop).
  • Easy to learn, mostly intuitive with basic training.
Cons
  • 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.
Likelihood to Recommend
Looker is a great place to be a one-stop shop for daily (or real-time) info into the company's performance. We have a business intelligence database that syncs with production daily (over-night). So, this is a good tool to use first thing in the morning to see what happened yesterday. This tool needs high organizational alignment to do some finance specific use cases like scenario comparison or near term P&L modeling. It is best suited to output historical data, we've found it cumbersome to have our forecast models live (and calculate) within Looker.

Looker from a BI consultant's perspective in SMEs, with pros, cons and unique features.

Rating: 8 out of 10
Incentivized
August 24, 2015
CL
Christian Lubasch
Managing Director & Co-Founder
LeROI Digital Analytics & Marketing Consultancy (Internet, 11-50 employees)
Vetted Review
Verified User
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
As a Digital Analytics & Business Intelligence consultancy, we're always on the look for modern and fresh approaches to common issues. There has been a clear overload of enterprise focused tools and companies that failed to address unique needs of SMEs. While there are some obvious leaders in the field of BI software for reporting and visualisation (like Tableau), Looker made its way up to challenge those. We've been consulting companies in setup, implementation and usage of Looker from startups to mid-sized companies. With the clear focus on data discovery and modeling, we've saved lots of time in reusable models and additionally helped clients to properly depict their business circumstances in BI.
Pros
  • Interesting approach to data modelling (LookML), that highly increases re-usability, is version controlled and much easier to understand for people that are not fluent in SQL.
  • Makes data discovery fun and easy.
  • Collaboration features
Cons
  • Visualisation capabilities clearly lack behind Tableau and some others.
  • Allow for custom branding and CSS changes to fit a given corporate identity / design.
  • Ability to blend data between different sources (i.e. two different connections / databases).
Likelihood to Recommend
When focus is on understanding, playing, discovery and standard reporting needs, Looker is a very interesting tool to use. When done right, you can go up and down, back and forth in your data, link different "looks" or dashboards together and very interestingly, you can define what happens (i.e. is shown) when users drill down on a certain metric. With teams of analysts in place, a shared LookML, version controlled repository will help to keep data models right and in sync - no more 20 different versions of an Excel file or such.
After all, the Looker UI is very simple to use, simpler than Excel, Tableau, Qlik etc.

For the most fancy visualisations or complex reports I'd rather choose other software as of now. However, becoming data-driven and using data to generate the best insights possible is key here - this is definitely not mainly achieved by visualisations (partly also because it requires more time / resources to do it right than most companies have available).

It's not entirely well suited for very small companies due to its pricing structure, but that applies to many others in the field as well, that also target mid sized to large companies.

Review from a GA user

Rating: 8 out of 10
Incentivized
August 19, 2015
Verified User
Manager in Marketing
Internet Company, 11-50 employees
Vetted Review
Verified User
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
Looker is being used mainly by the Marketing and Content departments.
It addresses problems such as customer segmentation for email marketing campaigns, revenue segmentation by marketing channel and through time.
With it, it is easier to assemble information from different data sources without constantly needing a DBA.
Analysis such as cohort and first-click attribution are easier to do.
Pros
  • It is easy to use for someone who has previous experience with Excel. This way, it doesn't take a long time to start working proficiently with Looker.
  • The developers don't seem to take a long time to create a new explore window for a different kind of analysis that is needed. This way, it also seems to have a straightforward usability for them.
  • The formulas it has for in-screen content are sufficient to see information such as accumulated sum and share between channels.
Cons
  • It would be interesting if it was possible to expand or collapse a field for further details in the same way it is done by a pivot table on Excel. The process to segment after clicking takes some time and it is not very usable as it demands the user to change windows.
  • The charts could have more options such as adding a target line in a column chart and changing the bar color if it is under or over the line.
  • It would be nice if inputing some kinds of data was possible to do for a non developer. Some data don't come from APIs and therefore need to be uploaded manually.
Likelihood to Recommend
While Looker has good usability, it still needs a strong presence of developers. If a colleague of a different company has a constant contact with the company's developers, I would recommend Looker. Otherwise, I would alert that for different kinds of analysis, the creation of different explore windows or auxiliary tables are needed and, therefore, the work of a DBA is needed.

Great robust product that helps scale

Rating: 9 out of 10
Incentivized
September 28, 2019
Verified User
Manager in Marketing
Financial Services Company, 11-50 employees
Vetted Review
Verified User
Looker
5 years of experience
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
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.
Pros
  • 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.
Cons
  • 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.
Likelihood to Recommend
It is great if you have a lot of data sources and are struggling to keep them in one place where you can also analyze it. Looker is great for helping create and keep track of data and reports that might be coming from many different places. On the other hand, if you are already using something that helps create reports and analyze data while not having many data sources, this might not be as useful.
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