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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 (93)
    8.7
    87%
  • 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

(376)

Attribute Ratings

Reviews

(26-50 of 97)
Companies can't remove reviews or game the system. Here's why
Danilo Roberto Zerón | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
An example of a scenario where Google Looker Studio is less appropriate for a business would be a start-up that is seeking to keep costs low, and that is advertising or seeking to report on performance data across multiple platforms. Google Looker Studio has the capability to "blend" cross-channel data into a singular report, but this feature does require a paid "connector" tool, or multiple tools, to successfully complete the integration. Therefore, lower-budget and multi-channel organizations might not be best suited for GLS. On the other hand, any organization seeking to report on Google Data across the Google platform will find tremendous resources in GLS with respect to data analytics and performance reporting!
March 12, 2024

Looker Review.

Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Looker could be a good tool for day-to-day, but it is difficult to maintain for some advanced features, and it could be broken sometimes; it helps users with no experience to develop and create data reports that can be more difficult with other tools with no experience, so it could be adopted in an easy way.
Marcos Vinícius Costa de Carvalho | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Looker is such a great product when it comes to free tools for presenting data. it can natively connect to different external sources and google products, which makes it a great tool to monitor Web Analytics, ad analytics and Social media. it could include a data wrangling module (such as power query in Powe BI) and add more native connectors. An API connector would be great, too. I also feel like it lacks customization options for the visuals, when compating to Power BI. It is too much restrained by the Material UI design, which does not necessarily fits all branding needs. Another great feature is the colaboration. Different from Power BI, you can real time collaborate with this tool, which is great for larger teams!
Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
It is especially useful for organizations when it can be used as the single source of truth for all the analytics.

It would not be the best option if some data is not accessible easily or in the cloud. Also in case other visualization tools are need, it may add an unnecessary step to really be able to analyze all the data.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Joining data from different sources or setting up customizable reports based on data housed outside standard reporting tools. Create dashboards for end-users to fulfill their reporting needs, reducing regular work and lifting on centralized team members. Using templates to plug and play to get data visualizations pretty quickly and painlessly! Unfortunately, if you've previously used Looker with Google's Universal Analytics, you'll need to reset a lot of the data parameters to work with GA4 data, but once you've done this, it works really well and is a lot less painful than using GA4 natively.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
I'd say that Looker is fantastic for distributing the efficacy of marketing efforts. It can be a one-stop shop for everything related to this. However, if your organization doesn't have direct access to live data and instead has only access to images of your data, then Looker may not be the best bet for you.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Well Suited: Aggregating massive amounts of data, segmenting it by a given unit of time, and setting up reports to monitor it. When properly set up, Looks can be the bedrock of an organization's analytical/reporting capability.

Less Appropriate: Explore models can quickly become dysfunctional and slow. One area for improvement is some kind of recommendation system to say "make these tweaks to your Explore to avoid errors with loading time."
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Looker proves to be very useful and efficient in large organizations where there is a need to aggregate and visualize data, KPI metrics etc. from multiple sources within the organization.
It is also a good solution where employees used to use Excel for data analysis and want to switch to a more powerful solution without the need to learn SQL.
February 20, 2024

Deep dive into Looker

Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Very easy to customize views when the base data is the same - people with zero SQL knowledge can view and get the required data with minimum training.

Very useful when the data is scattered across tables and a user wishes to co-relate all and extract the results.

Easy to have data in dynamic and also get a current snapshot.

Memory/performance issues come in when there is a lot of data.
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Looker is well-suited to visually display and scale data accessibility, and is a fantastic BI tool. The tool enables the end user to pull the data they are looking for and minimizes the need for an ad-hoc reporting team.
Scott Schaen | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Looker is a great solution if making data available is a priority, or if flexibility/customization is really important. Dashboards and visualizations are good, but it's not Looker's strong suit. Looker is also not a tool for blending different datasets, however there's now a beta feature that takes a stab at this. The Looker UI is pretty intuitive from a user perspective.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Looker is a good tool for data analytics and visualizations. It can be integrated with other data sources easily. It is a cloud-based solution in which you can easily transform your data and visualize it according to the organization requirements.
It helps us to enable the target users to give more information about the data, if they are using other legacy system, then they will found that how easy is to analyze data using Looker.
Overall a good and reliable solution.
Vincent Fernando Juares | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
All in all, you can create fast stunning dashboards from scratch. However, it can be a bit difficult to maintain in the long run as some advanced features appear to be lacking. We had an instance where we needed to use Tableau for a particular dashboard.
Anson Abraham | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
If you are looking at Looker for key performance metrics for IT-related things (like a data dog aspect), this will not be the use case you would want to use Looker. This is great for looking at the overall performance of sales, inventory, and dashboards of information related to the business itself.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
I definitely would recommend Looker, it is an awesome tool. Though I do like it more, the only reason I would not recommend it is because it is not the most widely used tool for this type of software and there are not as many resources out there online for it.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Looker is well suited for a larger organization that has a lot of data that needs to be modeled for the business. It makes it easy to manage and process this data and display it in a way that makes sense.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
I love Looker and it helps on the "money" side of the business to see where you stand. I generally don't like using it for product data because the visualization isn't great. If you are comfortable and familiar with excel and SQL, Looker is an easy transition and you will pick it up quite quickly.
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
For less evolved reporting, it is not bad at all. It is not designed to scale, fully. I mean that as long as you do not intend to scale, it is a good product for your company. Log aggregation level reporting is not suited for Looker. Customer facing data reporting is. As long as the reporting is not too multi-dimensional, Looker is good.
November 17, 2020

Solid performer

Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Looker is well suited for companies with a data team. It's more suited for internal reporting because the presentation is pretty basic. It does not let you export as Powerpoint and no options for a custom cover page. It is less suited for companies with no data team and no SQL knowledge.
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