Looker from a BI consultant's perspective in SMEs, with pros, cons and unique features.
August 24, 2015

Looker from a BI consultant's perspective in SMEs, with pros, cons and unique features.

Christian Lubasch | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Looker

As a Digital Analytics & Business Intelligence consultancy, we're always on the look for modern and fresh approaches to common issues. There has been a clear overload of enterprise focused tools and companies that failed to address unique needs of SMEs. While there are some obvious leaders in the field of BI software for reporting and visualisation (like Tableau), Looker made its way up to challenge those. We've been consulting companies in setup, implementation and usage of Looker from startups to mid-sized companies. With the clear focus on data discovery and modeling, we've saved lots of time in reusable models and additionally helped clients to properly depict their business circumstances in BI.
  • Interesting approach to data modelling (LookML), that highly increases re-usability, is version controlled and much easier to understand for people that are not fluent in SQL.
  • Makes data discovery fun and easy.
  • Collaboration features
  • Visualisation capabilities clearly lack behind Tableau and some others.
  • Allow for custom branding and CSS changes to fit a given corporate identity / design.
  • Ability to blend data between different sources (i.e. two different connections / databases).
  • Tableau Desktop,Tableau Server,Qlik Sense,QlikView,Sisense,Microsoft BI,TARGIT,Jaspersoft,Klipfolio,Domo,Pentaho,GoodData,Mode
This question is very complex and depends on the concrete business needs. Looker plays very well when focus is on data discovery, ease-to-use and complex data modeling done straight in the tool. For a super complex dashboard, reports and in a huge enterprise environment with extreme dependencies, there are tools that are currently better suited.
One of Looker's strength is to truly enable self-service BI, by giving almost everybody access to the system in a browser environment without the need of a thick client software and for a relatively low marginal price per user.
Looker isn't designed for merging data from separate data sources, unless it's already living in the same database. However, the software connects well to the many different database technologies out there, with a lack of support for APIs (Salesforce, Google products like Analytics/AdWords, etc.), which is crucial for digital companies especially in marketing and today's API economy. Real-time requirements are definitely possible.
Collaboration is very easy in Looker. You can always share "looks" (analyses), reports, dashboards etc. with co-workers. Everybody has his/her own "space" to play around. People can simply share and schedule all pieces or have them delivered as CSV, HTML, etc.. Even collaboration on data modelling layer is possible! Access control and permission settings are very detailed and granular.
When focus is on understanding, playing, discovery and standard reporting needs, Looker is a very interesting tool to use. When done right, you can go up and down, back and forth in your data, link different "looks" or dashboards together and very interestingly, you can define what happens (i.e. is shown) when users drill down on a certain metric. With teams of analysts in place, a shared LookML, version controlled repository will help to keep data models right and in sync - no more 20 different versions of an Excel file or such.
After all, the Looker UI is very simple to use, simpler than Excel, Tableau, Qlik etc.

For the most fancy visualisations or complex reports I'd rather choose other software as of now. However, becoming data-driven and using data to generate the best insights possible is key here - this is definitely not mainly achieved by visualisations (partly also because it requires more time / resources to do it right than most companies have available).

It's not entirely well suited for very small companies due to its pricing structure, but that applies to many others in the field as well, that also target mid sized to large companies.

Looker Feature Ratings

Pixel Perfect reports
4
Customizable dashboards
7
Drill-down analysis
9
Formatting capabilities
7
Integration with R or other statistical packages
4
Report sharing and collaboration
10
Publish to Web
10
Publish to PDF
3
Report Versioning
4
Report Delivery Scheduling
8
Pre-built visualization formats (heatmaps, scatter plots etc.)
4
Location Analytics / Geographic Visualization
8
Multi-User Support (named login)
9
Role-Based Security Model
10
Multiple Access Permission Levels (Create, Read, Delete)
10
Responsive Design for Web Access
10
Dashboard / Report / Visualization Interactivity on Mobile
8