Extremely satisfied analytics/data science professional deploying BI to the 99%
August 18, 2015

Extremely satisfied analytics/data science professional deploying BI to the 99%

Ian Hardenburgh | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Software Version

3.26.13

Modules Used

  • LookML; Explore; Spaces

Overall Satisfaction with Looker

Currently, Looker is being used by a small contingent of Analytics-minded people, with the idea that the product would eventually scale to the C-Suite, and possibly deployed company-wide. The functional areas cross almost every department. At the moment, we are employing Looker to address problems re: gross margin (on both our core and ancillary products/services), attrition and business development.
  • The LookML language for creating data models is extremely intuitive. It blurs the line between the data integration aspect of BI and the visualization or self-service BI component.
  • The dashboarding interface, from both a developer and end-user (UI) perspective, is beautifully modern.
  • The data table can use some basic features, like the ability to subtotal and renaming and grouping of column headers. However, as Looker is primarily a visualization tool, one might consider some features superfluous.
I evaluated everything under the Gartner BI quadrant (i.e., Tableau, Birst, MS SSRS, MicroStrategy, etc.) — from the niche players, all the way through the powerhouse (supposed) "leaders" in BI. Looker was a nice fit for my company, because all though we are quite large (in terms of market capitalization and the # of employees), funding for analytics has been relatively small. Additionally, BI or decision making data is generally consumed, not created by our business community. Therefore, it was just as important that a BI visualization solution made just as much sense for our developers as it did for our stakeholders.
My rating is based on real-time experience and some exposure to features that I've yet to employ.
First hand experience with Looker's scheduled e-mail and in-app sharing functionality.
If your company is just introducing itself to self-service BI/analytics/data science, mostly in terms of culture, decision making and perhaps its overall analytic capacity, Looker is a very nice entry point. I'd imagine it could also serve more advanced analytical models/applications. The real appeal is the LookML modeling language, which will help a company's development to streamline its visualization/dashboard efforts to drive better decision making within your enterprise.

Looker Feature Ratings

Pixel Perfect reports
8
Customizable dashboards
7
Report Formatting Templates
4
Drill-down analysis
9
Formatting capabilities
4
Integration with R or other statistical packages
Not Rated
Report sharing and collaboration
8
Publish to Web
8
Publish to PDF
8
Report Versioning
10
Report Delivery Scheduling
8
Pre-built visualization formats (heatmaps, scatter plots etc.)
10
Location Analytics / Geographic Visualization
10
Predictive Analytics
Not Rated
Multi-User Support (named login)
8
Role-Based Security Model
8
Multiple Access Permission Levels (Create, Read, Delete)
8
Responsive Design for Web Access
Not Rated
Mobile Application
Not Rated
Dashboard / Report / Visualization Interactivity on Mobile
Not Rated