Robust and speedy BI tool for companies with internal data science and ETL resources to bring out its full potential.
August 18, 2015
Robust and speedy BI tool for companies with internal data science and ETL resources to bring out its full potential.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Looker
We use Looker across our entire organization. It helps us understand what happens across the many facets of our business from support to marketing to product interaction.
- Blazingly fast for most queries as it sits on top of our Redshift instance.
- The ability to create user-defined filter presets through "Listeners" on dashboards that can be adjusted by the end user is really nice for making the product more accessible to non-technical business users.
- The interface is very fast, limited only by the complexity of the data/dimensions we're trying to work with.
- Support is AMAZING. Our live chat support team are always super friendly and go above and beyond to help us. I even had their CTO Lloyd respond to me once.
- Looker has come a long way in the brief time I've used it. However it is still challenging for non-technical business users to pick up and use, even with training. Dashboards are much more accessible once configured by a knowledgeable user, but the root of the issue is that our underlying data is complex and nuanced, and requires an internal technical resource who can own the data to properly inform and guide on the appropriate dimensions to use.
- Integrating Snowplow Analytics (Looker's recommended web analytics solution) has been a headache, despite how powerful the data is once it is working. But don't expect it to be a replacement for off-the-shelf web analytics tools like Google Analytics as Looker doesn't really have any of those reports "out of the box" since you need to model it all out yourself. It is nowhere near as intuitive to explore web data with Looker as it is with Google Analytics.
- The biggest challenge Looker highlighted for us was the issues with our own data and ETL. Not so much their fault, but at the end of the day, the data issues have made leveraging Looker to its full potential difficult. Having a dedicated Data Science and ETL engineer is pretty much necessary if your data has even minor complexity.
- RJMetrics,Domo,Mixpanel,KISSmetrics
I considered Looker along with RJ Metrics and Domo. The other platforms seemed to be offering much more of a service-focused offering, with fees that would likely scale quite high without certainty. Looker is focused on more of a product-driven approach and would be a good fit for companies with the data/analytics resources in-house to handle the ETL, integration, and ongoing management.
If you don't really have those resources in-house, a solution like RJ Metrics, which provides a team of analysts to help manage your data and build out the actual models for you might be a better solution.
At the other end of the spectrum of tools are things like Mixpanel and Kissmetrics. Both charge based on events, and frankly weren't robust enough for our needs with Looker in terms of how we wanted to leverage our data. Those solutions might be a better fit for companies without other web analytics solutions and who need something a bit better tooled out of the box for answering standard business questions.
If you don't really have those resources in-house, a solution like RJ Metrics, which provides a team of analysts to help manage your data and build out the actual models for you might be a better solution.
At the other end of the spectrum of tools are things like Mixpanel and Kissmetrics. Both charge based on events, and frankly weren't robust enough for our needs with Looker in terms of how we wanted to leverage our data. Those solutions might be a better fit for companies without other web analytics solutions and who need something a bit better tooled out of the box for answering standard business questions.