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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 8.1

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 8.3

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.

6.8
Avg 8.0

Access Control and Security

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

8.5
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 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

(378)

Attribute Ratings

Reviews

(51-75 of 97)
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Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Looker is very well suited for analytics teams. It is super easy for analysts to create visualizations that are tied to data pipelines, and very easy for us to make changes. However, the Explore function might be harder for non-technical audiences to understand and therefore we needed to put on a lot of training for stakeholders.
Dustin Hovey | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Looker is a great tool when it has a lot of data to ingest and a lot of sources to link to. Since Looker works best at scale it is likely best for the organizations that operate at scale (medium to large business), specifically, organizations that a juggling multiple marketing/sales channels.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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.
Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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.
September 28, 2019

Complex but powerful

Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Looker helps users to visualize data from multiple sources. It is good at helping to stitch together multiple reports. With the proper training, it can combine data from different channels and display it in a way to allows users to visualize the impact of different variables. You can even create dashboards that are customizable for different users or roles.
Maddie Morris | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
It works really effectively to highlight activity within a specific brand. It's an excellent tool to reference the same reports with updated information, and it's easy enough to modify 1 thing to be able to access the same info across many clients.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
If you're a company who's been in business for a few years, and can afford a Looker license, then I wouldn't really look anywhere else. We've looked at a TON of data analytics/BI tools over the years and Looker is, by far, the best we've seen. However, that comes with a cost. If you're a new startup, Looker probably isn't appropriate for you because of the cost.
Jasmeet S Babra | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Looker is the best BI tool for an enterprise-level company. It allows everyone to work on their space and create reports and dashboards. They have done a great job with their own simpler version of SQL like language to set up tables, called lookml, which is very easy to write, and the documentation on it is excellent! Their customer support is phenomenal! What could be better are their filtering options and visualization options.
Jacob Rasmussen | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 5 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Looker is extremely well suited for a large company that can devote a large number of resources to running and maintaining Looker. It is also great if you have a large analytics initiative and you need a consistent data model in order to avoid different analytics based on the same topic.
Shelby Bowden | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Looker is well suited for use as a BI tool and, in my opinion, is a sleeker and user-friendly alternative to Tableau. It is great for visualizing data with minimal setup and minimal SQL knowledge for analysts. If your analysts are tech savvy and are comfortable with SQL there might be cheaper alternatives to Looker.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Looker is excellent when there is a large team and when there is a lot of data required to be integrated. It does an excellent job in visualizations and creating charts. It is less appropriate for smaller teams as it is very expensive. If visualizations require too many customizations then Looker is slightly less appropriate. Overall, it provides great visualizations and drill-down analysis. Visualizations can be improved based on the current technology in the market.
Jennifer Lamas | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Looker adapts perfectly when we need to know project data that the company finances, we use it to make the most of the resources that are going to be used and in what way, it is an advantage since it helps us to make very important decisions when approving some project or deny it, since its analyzes are fast reliable and in real time
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Depending on organization size and the amount of data that you collect, that will strongly determine if this is appropriate for you. For less complex scenarios, I may suggest Excel/Google Sheets because you're probably already familiar with the tools. I only suggest it if you have more basic things to analyze.
Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
When you've had a technical expert spend the significant time required to customize your Looker experience, then it could very well be one of the top contenders in its space. You are able to log in, see what you need immediately, dig deeper quickly, and integrate smoothly with your other tools. This one caveat, however, is a big one; and thus the lower score.
December 20, 2017

Look No Further

Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Looker is best for environments in which users are empowered to perform some of their own exploration and analysis. Although it is an excellent dashboard tool in its own right, its potential isn’t realized until data models specific to each line of business are created and users understand how to explore their own data.
Vinaybabu Raghunandha Naidu | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Looker is well suited to showcase the company progress and trend visually where the data is noisy and huge. Multiple types of data visualization can be included in a single frame. Best in Dynamic dashboard creation and data projection in real time.
Less suited when OLAP datasources are connected which increases the data retrieval time and loading to looker is slow.
Henri Allik | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Looker can be used for almost everything, but the solution might not be the most straightforward in more technical cases. With the latest upgrade to Looker 5 it is super simple and fast to build dashboards. Looker is great for automated reporting using scheduling feature. Looker is not so great for ad-hoc complex queries as you would need to build it in LookML first - however, this can be now solved using SQL runner built-in Looker and create temporary Explores
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Looker is strongly recommended as a Business Intelligence tool when you wish to work with huge amounts of data. Moreover, Looker capitalizes on the power of your own database, and does not have its own analytics engine. This cuts down cost and makes it more performance-oriented.

On the other hand, if you are looking for out-of-the-box trends or data patterns, Looker is not the right tool for you.
Mohammed Anzil | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Th reason why I did not rate it 9 points is because of the price but I rated it 8 because if its use. Users can discover details behind the picture because all dashboards and queries can be drilled into. Looker offers a free trial but if a small business team decided to buy the software, sometimes they can't afford that.
Gleb Mezhanskiy | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Very well suited for modeling and exposing data of any data source with a SQL interface including but not limited to Hive and Spark.

Greatly reduces the burden on engineers by allowing business users to perform analysis, build visualizations and put together dashboards themselves.

Currently cannot handle other data interfaces, such as Splunk.
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