Looker freed our analytics team from the burden of data requests
August 18, 2015

Looker freed our analytics team from the burden of data requests

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

Software Version

3.26.16

Overall Satisfaction with Looker

Looker is used by the entire organization as a tool to make data driven decisions across all departments. Our executives use it to track high level KPIs. Each department uses it to track their team specific KPIs and to create custom reports to answer business critical questions.

Pros

  • Looker makes it easy for executives to track KPIs in real-time
  • Looker makes it easy for all team members to create custom reports to answer questions with data, without relying on the analytics team
  • Looker makes it easy for the analytics team to build reporting views for each team in the organization so that individual team members can be self-sufficient in their data needs
  • Looker makes visualizing data easy, so all team members can recognize trends and make decisions based on data

Cons

  • Looker's visualization options are continually improving and will be better in the near-future, but most standard visualizations are available
  • Looker is constrained by the functions that your flavor of SQL provides, so make sure you choose wisely when building your data warehouse
  • Mode,Tableau
I chose Looker because it was more flexible and easier to use. The biggest advantage it had over the competitors was ease of use for all of the members of our organization and the flexibility Looker has for giving each team member the ability to create custom reports. This frees our analytics team to work on high-level projects instead of answering every data question that comes up.
Looker is easy to connect to a data source (SQL DB), allows all SQL functionality and provides additional functionality through their LookML language. Looker run queries in real-time but also allows for scheduling queries so that performance can be optimized. Looker allows you to use multiple data sources and models and allows for flexibility in permissioning users and access.
Looker has customizable access controls so users can be provisioned to access only certain data sources. It also allows for sharing reports and dashboards across teams and allows for scheduling reports and dashboards to be emailed to team members. Reports can also be exported to Google sheets or Excel and can then be updated in near real-time.
Looker is flexible and allows you to provide a clean view into your data warehouse, even if your database has become unruly. That said, the cleaner your DB is the faster your Looker queries will run.

Looker Feature Ratings

BI Platform ()
Not Rated
Supported Data Sources ()
Not Rated
8.3
Pixel Perfect reports
8
Customizable dashboards
10
Report Formatting Templates
7
10.0
Drill-down analysis
10
Formatting capabilities
10
Report sharing and collaboration
10
10.0
Publish to Web
10
Publish to PDF
10
Report Delivery Scheduling
10
8.0
Pre-built visualization formats (heatmaps, scatter plots etc.)
10
Location Analytics / Geographic Visualization
10
Predictive Analytics
4
10.0
Multi-User Support (named login)
10
Role-Based Security Model
10
Multiple Access Permission Levels (Create, Read, Delete)
10
8.0
Responsive Design for Web Access
8
Application Program Interfaces (APIs) / Embedding ()
Not Rated

Looker Support

I can get responses to questions in minutes through their in-app chat feature. They have provided 6 months of LookML training to our analytics team, with weekly calls. They also provided in-office business user training for our entire organization.
ProsCons
Quick Resolution
Good followup
Knowledgeable team
Problems get solved
Kept well informed
No escalation required
Immediate help available
Support understands my problem
Support cares about my success
Quick Initial Response
None
No - The support that Looker provides is probably the support I have found in a product. They are responsive, friendly, helpful and go above and beyond to make sure that I am satisfied with Looker
Yes - I reported the bug using their chat feature and received a response the same minute. They researched the issue and responded with a fix that went out the same day. They also provided a work-around that I was able to implement within an hour.
Looker offers 6 months of LookML training that includes weekly calls with a team of four support staff that answer questions, help you code complex problems and help you optimize all of your queries. They go above and beyond to make sure that Looker is implemented in the best way possible and then do a training for all business users so that everyone in your organization knows how to use Looker for self-service reporting. This is all included as part of the standard subscription.

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