My look at Looker
August 18, 2015

My look at Looker

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Software Version

3.26.16

Overall Satisfaction with Looker

Looker is being used across the entire organization. The strategic and business areas use it to get an overview of several aspects, especially, revenue related. Marketing people use it a lot because of most of our campaigns are performance based. The content area uses it to see if they are doing things right (checking users' engagement). Although IT is not working with it, Looker frees resources from this department since most of queries were created by them.
  • Easy to set up and, at the same time, allows more control from administrators that really know what the data is
  • Very straightforward for end users
  • Support is very good: they answer very quickly
  • Some specific queries still are not supported or have to be done via some tweaks
  • I don't know if it is possible but I had a problem that I had to create several explorers with the same views depending on where the from clause is used. This is very confusing for end users: sometimes they don't know which Explorer they should use.
  • RJMetrics,Yellowfin
RJMetrics is targeted to a team that doesn't have someone to create SQL and works better for a specific target: e-commerce. We had a bad time adapting it to our data model and any changes on it depended on their team. That slowed down our process. Yellowfin was closer to what we wanted but was too slow and still was not so "adaptive".
Looker works very great in our company but it still very expensive.
All product related departments use Looker (strategy, operations, marketing and content), that is, at about 8 users.
Actually, we only use one data source (Redshift) and it was quite simple. I can't tell about merging data from other sources. This is done in Redshift.
I still get confused on Looker folders. Maybe because it has just changed and I am not used to it. It is still hard to see what other people have done and rework is common.
Looker performs well if there is someone with a technical background (SQL) and that knows about the data. If nobody who knows the data model knows how to create queries (especially to configure), the team will have a bad time configuring it.

Looker Feature Ratings

Pixel Perfect reports
9
Customizable dashboards
9
Report Formatting Templates
8
Drill-down analysis
9
Formatting capabilities
7
Report sharing and collaboration
8
Publish to Web
8
Publish to PDF
9
Report Versioning
9
Report Delivery Scheduling
9
Pre-built visualization formats (heatmaps, scatter plots etc.)
8
Location Analytics / Geographic Visualization
Not Rated
Predictive Analytics
Not Rated
Multi-User Support (named login)
9
Role-Based Security Model
9
Multiple Access Permission Levels (Create, Read, Delete)
9
Responsive Design for Web Access
Not Rated
Mobile Application
Not Rated
Dashboard / Report / Visualization Interactivity on Mobile
Not Rated