Highly Recommend Looker as Your BI Tool!
We used Looker to create graphs and reports to visualize complex data sets. Looker assisted us in identifying long-term and short-term …
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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Popular Features
- Customizable dashboards (93)8.787%
- Report sharing and collaboration (95)8.686%
- Drill-down analysis (92)8.282%
- Formatting capabilities (93)7.474%
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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…
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- Free Trial
- Free/Freemium Version
- Premium Consulting/Integration Services
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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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How To Use Looker as a Business User
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Product Details
- About
- Competitors
- Tech Details
- FAQs
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 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 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
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 Types | On-premise, Software as a Service (SaaS), Cloud, or Web-Based |
|---|---|
| Operating Systems | Windows, Linux, Mac |
| Mobile Application | No |
| Supported Countries | United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Mexico, Germany, France, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Brazil |
| Supported Languages | English |
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.
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).
Comparisons
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Reviews and Ratings
(376)Attribute Ratings
Reviews
(26-50 of 96)Companies can't remove reviews or game the system. Here's why
March 12, 2024
Looker Review.
- Simple interface.
- Helps users with no SQL experience.
- Easy to integrate.
- Scalability for large data.
- Time for import large amount of data.
March 12, 2024
Looker: Cheap for what it delivers!
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
- Visually good graphical representations
- Data combination tool
- Native data integration with google products (ads, analytics, etc)
- Fully real-time collaborative
- Lacks a native data wrangling tool
- few options for visuals customization
- few native connectors with external sources
- Excel Online Connector
March 12, 2024
Using Looker as explorer for the last year
- Integration with some solutions
- Easy data extractation
- Easy to build visuals
- It is too difficult for simple use cases
- User experience is not intuitive enough for explorers
- Integrations with other visualization tools from other companies can improve
- Easy to set up.
- Shareable and end-user ease of use.
- Data joining is a particular highlight for tagging up URLs.
- Plug and play in many cases.
- Menus and navigation for set up can be a bit confusing for first time users.
- Add the ability to manually change the canvas size rather than setting it in pixels, which is counterintuitive.
March 11, 2024
Looker is the report engine for you!
- Granular reporting.
- Ease of building.
- Ease of access.
- Needs training to be a builder.
- Needs training to be a user.
- Can get visually cluttered.
March 11, 2024
Integral, Awesome software
- Filtering - you can filter across different dimensions and metrics to get a more specific "cut" of data
- Refreshing - data automatically ingests into Looker which allows reports to be updated and backfilled in real time
- Conditional Reporting - you can leverage Looker's reporting features to flag when a given metric or KPI falls below or above a specified threshold. For example, if you had a daily sales benchmark in a SAAS organization, you could use Looker to flag whenever daily sales falls above or below the benchmark
- Filtering - while the filter-ability of Looker is quite robust, the feature can be quite inconsistent. For example, sometimes you have to refresh a Look several times to get a filter to register all available options
- Row Limit - while it happens infrequently, it may be the case that you need to export a dataset that is comprised of over 5,000 rows. Looker can be a bit finicky in this case, as you are unable to export over that amount, which means you would need to export the data in multiple sets, increasing the likelihood of duplicate rows
- Data delay - sometimes the timing around data refreshes can be very inconsistent, so it can be difficult to guarantee a Look refreshing correctly at a specified time.
March 11, 2024
Look no further than Looker!
- Cross reference
- Data analysis
- Data piping
- Highly complex, requires many hours to truly master
March 11, 2024
Great BI tool for data aggregation
- The response speed of the dashboards
- Seamless integration with Slack/Salesforce/Github etc.
- Visualizing the KPI metrics of multiple divisions in a unified dashboard
- Still room for improvement in terms of user interface
- Not so much room the customization
- Lack of documentation of some system errors
February 20, 2024
Deep dive into Looker
- The explore view of Looker saves the day - Creating adhoch reports is super simple
- Slicing, dicing and filtering data based on multiple parameters is super easy rather than writing complex SQL queries
- Adding fields, removing fields, changing layouts, minor alterations and joining tables to get the desired data is easier than ever
- People can save their own views for the next time - same base data can have N number of views based on users and fields
- Looker is less graphical or pictorial which makes it less attractive
- Consumes a lot of memory when there are multiple rows and columns, impacts performance too
- At times when we download huge chunks of raw data from Looker dashbords, the time taken to prepare the file is enormous - The user fails to understand if Looker has frozen or if the data is getting prepared in the background for downloading. In turn, user ends up triggering multiple downloads
September 18, 2023
Looker is a fantastic BI tool that scales with the business
- Able to connect to multiple different data sources
- Easy data filtering and navigation
- Clean visualizations and easy to download the data
- Looker lacks the ability to provide 'and' operators when filtering. Only 'or' is provided
- Looker lacks the ability to auto create a data dictionary for defined dimensions and measures within the software. A person must access the API to create one, which is rather inconvenient
- Looker lacks the ability to display descriptions on the Lookml Dashboard view, which is a list of dashboards where descriptions are not displayed
December 23, 2022
Looker's great if you're looking for a customizable solution for making data available to your team
- Customizing your build -- Fields and measures can represent whatever you want it to.
- Transparency -- Everything is translated to SQL in real-time so you know what's going on in the background.
- Innovation -- There's a monthly update where new features are regularly released.
- User Management and Sharing Data could be a little easier. Your entire model needs to be built with user permissions in mind.
- It's not quite as plug 'n play as the alternatives, but that's okay.
- Visualizations could be improved for large amounts of data.
- Date reporting could be improved. Date, week, hour, month, etc are separate fields...you can't quickly shift between them in reporting/visualizations.
May 04, 2022
Analyze your data efficiently with Looker
- The UI is simple and easy to understand.
- Online training materials is sufficient to work on the solution.
- Helps in keeping the data organized.
- Able to analyze data and visualize it.
- Easy to integrate with data sources.
- Addition of advanced level of visualization
- Must be scalable when you have a large amount of data.
- Data uploading time could be better.
- Wide options for data integration should be added.
July 30, 2021
Looker for our Business Operations team
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
- Visuals are amazing
- UI is easy to use
- Advanced formula creation seems to lack in comparison to other tools
May 14, 2021
Excellent tool with impeccable support team!
- Building dashboards
- Great interface that is simple enough
- Can collaborate with other teammates
- Can be slow at times
- Takes a lot of upfront investment.
- Better on the go and mobile tools.
May 08, 2021
Awesome software for our team
- 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.
- Can be slow at times.
- The set up initially can be tough.
- Customizing visualization could be improved.
- The core-visibility lets you monitor your entire workflow along with live data.
- The user interface makes the task of figuring out the data easy.
- Find the relevant data that your business needs.
- Build models on the fly.
- Customer service could be more responsive.
- Platform can be expensive depending on the level of your business.
May 02, 2021
Awesome product for data visualization
- Looker is easy to learn which is helpful because I can show other members of our team how to edit existing charts and graphs or reports.
- Looker customer service team is very supportive and helpful for us.
- Looker saves us a lot of time
- Some of the customization tools for graphs and charts could be improved.
- Could have a cheaper version is people are using for less complicated tasks.
May 02, 2021
Turn data into meaningful decisions
- Data migration
- Data visualization
- Graphing
- Charting
- Interface
- Customer support
- Onboarding
April 30, 2021
Look no further than into Looker
- Ease of use of report creation
- SQL syntax to modify or create reports
- Drag and drop functionalities
- Dashboard creation
- More data source connections
- Licensing model
- Integration with Active Directory or LDAP. Only OKTA for now.
April 30, 2021
An amazing data visualization tool
- user friendly
- searching
- visualization
- limited charting
- interface
- not as widely used
April 28, 2021
Wonderful tool and customer support
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
- User friendly.
- Good UI.
- Reporting.
- CPU usage.
- Slow.
- Bugs.
April 22, 2021
Looker helps us organize our business data
- SQL Capabilities
- Pivots and calculations
- Easy filtering
- The visualization isn't the best
- The left sidebar coloring makes it hard to see what is selected (bad for accessibility)
April 07, 2021
Looker is pretty good for the price
- Provides interesting data, provided the databases exist for it to be sliced.
- Delivery system is relatively easy to use.
- Customers can pick up the report creation pretty quickly.
- API is difficult to use, especially with auth problems.
- The LookMLs can be confusing with referenced objects.
- Maintaining on-prem servers requires a lot of maintenance.
- In the cloud the data writes slowly.
November 17, 2020
Solid performer
- It allows you to create looks for routine focus analysis.
- It allows you to build a dashboard simply by combining looks.
- The reports are easily shared simply by forwarding the link.
- Your work will unlikely be altered by other people with the option of 'Explore Here'.
- The charts are pretty basic.
- Presenting KPIs on the dashboard requires combining different 'looks' instead of one look including all.
- 'Look' cannot be exported in PDF format.
- It requires a lot of work to include multimedia.
- It requires good knowledge of SQL. (but once everything has been built, the users do not need it.)
- Deep learning curve.
October 04, 2019
Looker is a game changer for our company reporting
- Easy visualization based on SQL Logic.
- Easy to create pull and push changes.
- Beautiful graphs.
- Custom SQL writers can be slow.
- Sometimes development mode has errors for no reason.