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.