Best reporting tool that I've been using for years
Looker helps us in reporting. This is where we extract our daily productivity reports. This helps our company process data in real-time. I …
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 (95)8.888%
- Report sharing and collaboration (96)8.686%
- Drill-down analysis (93)8.282%
- Formatting capabilities (94)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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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
(378)Attribute Ratings
Reviews
(51-75 of 98)Companies can't remove reviews or game the system. Here's why
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.
October 03, 2019
Data and Reporting Made Easy
- It's user-friendly enough to democratize data for the entire organization; it's functional enough to be used by all users regardless of their experience with BI tools.
- Ability to quickly connect to data sources without heavy back-end data engineering requirements.
- Filters, visualization and data elements keep all of the information front and center and logically ordered for a power user.
- It can be difficult to customize the visualizations.
- Security groups and content restrictions can be confusing to set up and maintain.
- The tool can slow down for large and complex queries.
September 28, 2019
Great robust product that helps scale
- 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.
- 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.
September 28, 2019
Good data warehouse, but lacking some benefits
- 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.
- 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.
September 28, 2019
Complex but powerful
- Bring in data from different systems.
- Allow users to drill into reports and view the underlying data.
- Combine reports into custom dashboards.
- Difficult to display data in custom formats.
- Data needs to join on a single key instead of just showing what you want.
- Overly complex with difficult learning curve.
September 28, 2019
Excellent Social Sharing & Reporting Platform
- Easily modify saved reports to highlight specific points of interest.
- Report across multiple clients, lead paths and referral objects.
- Save reports to come back to frequently visited reports for real time updates.
- It was definitely tricky getting started. However, once you learn how the system classifies and organizes, it gets a lot easier.
- Sometimes Looker takes too long to load, and as a result won't find the object you're looking for.
- Occasional run-ins with the spinning wheel of death.
September 18, 2019
Looker is the tool you're looking for... if you can afford it.
- It's on-demand and in the cloud, we don't have to mess with AMIs or scaling issues
- Looker's data domain creating tool is better than anything we've seen
- LookML, Looker's specialized language is incredibly extensible and allows us to connect and visualize almost any data type
- Looker is expensive
- Looker's solution is pretty much set, they come out with new features, but because it's hosted, you don't have a ton of extensibility
- Creating public dashboards seem a bit difficult
September 14, 2019
Power BI tool for enterprises
- Email schedules for reports.
- Dashboard reporting.
- New and advanced charting, and analytical capabilities.
- It does very well with query optimization and displaying results.
- More charting colors and default scheme options.
September 13, 2019
A great tool that requires a ton of resources to deploy and maintain
- We were able to create a data model that was consistent with all users.
- We were able to customize our dashboards to our needs.
- Very simple tasks are very complicated in Looker. It is complicated for users to be able to create their own calculation, as these measures have to be added to the data model.
- Very simple calculations are complicated to add to the data model.
August 09, 2019
Looker - taking a closer look at your organization!
- Great management of complex and large amounts of data.
- Stunning visuals.
- Easy sharing of products and results.
- Mobile version is not the same caliber as the full version.
- Usage can become complex when performing unusual processes.
- Loading data can sometimes take a while.
- Beautiful visualizations.
- No advanced coding needed to manage (users can drag and drop).
- Easy to learn, mostly intuitive with basic training.
- 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.
- The modeling layer adds flexibility to how we can manipulate data before we show it.
- Easy to connect to Snowflake.
- Drill down feature is useful.
- Could use the drill down feature to another chart instead of a table.
- Navigation from explores to dashboard is cumbersome.
- Need richer pivot features: hide certain pivot columns from charts.
December 08, 2018
Looker - Business intelligence tool
- Excellent visualizations.
- Support for desktop as well as mobile.
- Integration with different data sources.
- It is very expensive and it is not for small teams. The tool is only relevant for large teams.
- There are not a lot of training opportunities or documentation available.
- Customization of visualizations is sometimes difficult.
November 17, 2018
Easy to use!
- Visualization, easy manipulation.
- Business leaders do not need-- nor do they want-- to write SQL to get the data and then visualize it.
- Graphs and spaces that can be shared with other users.
- Little pop overs or tips that appear as you hover mouse over an object.
June 18, 2018
Solution to analyze your data quickly and safely
- Filters that help to perform a deeper analysis
- Detailed data analysis
- It saves time when presenting works
- You get fast results
- Sometimes it takes to load the information
- The calculation field is advantageous, but not intuitive
- They should be able to accept many more databases
- For some people, it is usually very cumbersome
- Some of its functions are somewhat limited
June 15, 2018
Looker is awesome!
- Powerful dashboards with preset information.
- Easy to use for novices using the GUI but with advanced options for power users.
- Excellent support.
- Report caching can sometimes lag behind fairly significantly.
May 28, 2018
Looker - 2 Thumbs Up
- Easy to use (I was able to pick it up without too much training.)
- The presentation of the data is easy to interpret
- Getting frequent reports is easy to setup
- I would not necessarily say it is a con but it is a VAST tool so there might be features you may overlook
May 18, 2018
Using Looker in a Custom Integration
- Incredibly advanced analytics tool that is even more capable if you learn how to use LookML which is Looker's custom programming language.
- Quick access to the raw data that is being visualized allows you to spot check for data integrity.
- My usage with Looker is limited because of our integration but, having seen their updates over time, the integrations with Slack, Salesforce, and other tools appear to greatly improve organizations' workflows.
- The time it takes to load data has been INCREDIBLY frustrating to our clients. How much of this is the fault of our developers, I don't know. What I do know is that it's the slowest time to see a visualization of any BI tool I've used. By far.
- There is A LOT of exerting setup required for custom dashboards. When adding our custom integration into the mix it's been nearly impossible to get things done.
- The calculation field can be incredibly useful but, again, requires technical expertise which not all of our users have.
December 28, 2017
Looker is disrupting the BI marketplace
- Real time dashboards
- Guided Navigation, meaning you can bring up a dashboard or report, click on a cell and drill into the foundational data.
- Central Metadata Management. LookML metadata repository and language is a game changer.
- Better visualizations. 3d graphs and charts. A little more sex and sizzle.
- Adding a new data source and/or tables should be easier.
December 20, 2017
Look No Further
- The granular permissions sets allow a large amount of control over what users can see and do.
- Views, models, and (optionally) dashboards are version-controlled and stored in a git repo of your choosing. This is indispensable for having peace of mind when performing large refactors.
- Incredible customer support offered conveniently via live chat within the app. Feature requests are always taken seriously and you can check back anytime to see where it is in the queue.
- Option to implement custom D3 visualizations.
- There could be more stock visualizations.
- The delineation between user-defined dashboards and LookML-defined dashboards is confusing and disjointed.
December 12, 2017
Dynamic and Realtime Dashboards
- Helps to dynamically create filters.
- Easy user interface.
- Can connect to multiple datasources with ease.
- Representation of data in different formats : graphs, stats.
- Can share the looks to different teams and assign appropriate permissions for individual look.
- Can include multiple looks within one single dashboard.
- Creates cache data in the internal looker DB which consumes much space. Would be great if it has some garbage collection technique.
- 2 Factor authentication to user login will add more value to its security.
- Would be great to download the looks and send through an email.
December 07, 2017
Looker supports data self-serve - everyone can use it!
- Build it once - The reason why we have so many Looker users in TransferWise is because it is easy and fast to use. If tables have imported and modeled then everyone can quickly pick the fields and run they query.
- Simple - average users don't need to know SQL or have technical skills to use Looker.
- Automated reporting - Looker allows you to schedule emails for daily/weekly/monthly reports or send alerts if there are anomalies in data.
- Missing some more advanced visualization options, for example Trellis Line Graph
November 03, 2017
A BI Tool that is powerful and Easy to Use
- Automation of reports.
- Easy drag and drop interface for most functionalities.
- Great variety of reporting options.
- Works well with large data in terms of performance.
- Setting up looker is quite tedious.
- It takes a considerable amount of time to get handy with the features on Looker .
- Need to configure database separately every time you want to connect a new database.
April 15, 2016
Looker - The Perfect Business Data Analytics Provider
- Teamwork.
- Git for version management and collaboration.
- Powerful SQL modeling ability.
- Should lower the price.
- A bit hard to use the service if you are a newbie.
- Should give more demonstrations.