Looker - One of the best BI tools
August 27, 2015

Looker - One of the best BI tools

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

Software Version

3.26.16

Modules Used

  • Reporting tool

Overall Satisfaction with Looker

Looker is used by various departments including Marketing, Sales, Content, and Instructor Services. We use it to monitor the funnel from users visiting our web site to becoming paid customers, performance of our ad campaigns, the performance of students over a period of time, the health of our content, etc. We are able to make decisions based on the analysis we do while monitoring the above activities.
  • Looker connects directly to our databases in MySQL and hence there is no wait time for the data to be updated into another data warehouse.
  • LookML is extremely powerful and easy to learn.
  • Derived tables in Looker help in speeding up the reports.
  • Chat support is extremely efficient as the support personnel are quite knowledgeable.
  • The ability to connect to different data sources like Facebook and Mixpanel.
  • Visualization can be made better.
RJMetrics - Looker is clearly better than RJMetrics. RJMetrics was getting the connector ready for Mixpanel and they were working on one for Facebook. But we had too many issues with it. The data had to be taken from MySQL and ported into their data warehouse and it took hours to do that. The customer services turn around time wasn't great either.
It is real time with our MySQL database. But it does not connect to some other data sources like Mixpanel, Facebook, or Zendesk. So we have to do ETL to bring that data into MySQL first and then make them available in Looker.
Looker has a good range of roles and users that you can define and assign. The sharing capabilities in Looker are quite good as well.
If you are looking for good looking charts then Looker may not be the right tool. But if you are looking for data that you can consume and analyze then Looker is one of the best tools out there. The cost is a bit higher for startups like us. But the tool is much better than most other tools that are available for a lesser cost.

Looker Feature Ratings

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