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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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Recent Reviews

Top Notch Looker

9 out of 10
April 24, 2024
Incentivized
We use Looker to locate accounts, access data history for players and various things. These include wallet history, redemption history, a …
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Look no further!

10 out of 10
March 25, 2024
Incentivized
We use Looker as a business intelligence tools that translates our data into meaningful insights for consumption by internal and external …
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Great reporting tool

8 out of 10
March 15, 2024
Incentivized
We are using Looker Studio to create dashboards that’s can be shared with other departments. We can include information from different …
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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

Popular Features

View all 21 features
  • Customizable dashboards (94)
    8.8
    88%
  • Report sharing and collaboration (95)
    8.6
    86%
  • Drill-down analysis (92)
    8.2
    82%
  • Formatting capabilities (93)
    7.4
    74%

Reviewer Pros & Cons

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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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Alternatives Pricing

What is SAP Crystal?

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.

8.1
Avg 8.2

Ad-hoc Reporting

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

8.1
Avg 8.1

Report Output and Scheduling

Ability to schedule and manager report output.

8.6
Avg 8.4

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.

6.8
Avg 8.1

Access Control and Security

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

8.5
Avg 8.6

Mobile Capabilities

Support for mobile devices like smartphones and tablets.

5.8
Avg 8.0
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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 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).
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Comparisons

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Reviews and Ratings

(377)

Attribute Ratings

Reviews

(1-25 of 51)
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Scott Schaen | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Looker seems to have a lot of compatible data sources. I've seen the integrations vary depending on your database and security. There were instances where we had to SSH into the machine to get it to work. Looker is not built to blend different data sources/databases, however they do have a feature in beta. This would be really nice, but is not critical for us. The real-time nature of Looker is amazing because it just translates everything to SQL and runs queries on the spot.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
With SQL Runner and the proper SQL skills and access you can merge data easily. The built-in merges are not great so for a general marketer or sales person it may be tough to get what you need if it hasn't already been built-in by your BI or product teams.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
It was relatively easy to connect the data to Looker. Like I mentioned earlier it did require us to dedicate a few people to specifically doing that but it is also because we didn't have the data sources organized before and needed to do the original work. We also had to make sure it all made sense once it was implemented so the testing took some time.
Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
I don't have as much experience in this area of Looker management, but our main connection to Looker is through a homegrown system and an integration to Salesforce. The homegrown system connection seems to work very well but the Salesforce connection seems to have a lot of disruptions and causes some issues throughout the business.
September 28, 2019

Complex but powerful

Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Not a lot of systems have readily available connectors. This delays the process of getting up to speed and integrating data. Connectors are expensive and hard to build. Even when the data is flowing, it doesn’t always import into the right fiends and it takes a lot of manipulation to make things work properly.
Maddie Morris | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
I believe there can often be issues relating to how the data is classified on our site, making the connection to Looker sometimes difficult to establish. However, once the data is set up to correctly interface with Looker, I haven't had any problems.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We primarily use PostgreSQL and AWS Redshift. But we've been able to connect it to almost any data source we've thrown at it. The ability to merge datasets across different disjointed systems at scale is pretty amazing.
Shelby Bowden | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
I feel that Looker performs above average for data source connectivity. It has some issues, which are primarily associated with merging data sets (a problem which becomes worse when large data are used), but overall I have been pleased with its ability to integrate and source data for smooth use in the program.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
I was a Looker admin for the first 2 years (now I'm just a power user, so I don't deal with the data model anymore). We did most of our transformations before they get to looker (in our underlying redshift database). So, the SQL table structure is fairly usable and only from one database. Looker introduced a new feature last year that allows users to merge (like UNION) within individual views. So, users can merge data without needing an admin to create a new view in the data model.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
The majority of data conditions can be integrated with Looker. We have rarely seen something that cannot be integrated. It is not very difficult to integrate data. However, it would have been very useful to get some tutorials for the same. There is a shortage of training offered in Looker. This made us do a self-analysis of the tool.
Jennifer Lamas | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Excellent since you can work with several data bases and statistical programs such as Rstudio, Jupyter Notebook, it has great AI analytical techniques democratized with DataRobot, BIgSquid and other technological partners, Scalable learning with the integration of Google TensorFlow
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We have data from many different systems but once connected we have been able to create reports that pinpoint exactly what we need. Systems that may not natively speak to each other have been made easier to analyze with respect to each other.
Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
As I didn't do the initial setup and, as far as I can tell, without a fair amount of technical expertise it would be difficult to point to another data source, merged any data from various sources. or, because of TrustRadius' word requirement, I am eating tacos while using Looker, I haven't ever tried this.
December 20, 2017

Look No Further

Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Looker integrates with an expansive list of databases, from a traditional open-source RDBMS, such as Postgres or MySQL, to elastic hosted database, such as Snowflake. It does not provide ETL features.
Vinaybabu Raghunandha Naidu | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
It can be integrated with multiple datasources and data retrieval is realtime.
Looker dashboards are powered by Redshift, Treasure data and many more. Never encountered any connectivity issues.
Also in the recent upgrade it provides SSL level authentication
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