Item: Looker
Rating: 10
Author: Scott Schaen

Overall Satisfaction with Looker

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Looker to make clean data available to the rest of the company. Empowering teams with data in a quick and reliable way with as much of the technical nuances removed. It's an easy way to reduce reliance on the analytics team and make reporting as real-time as possible.

Pros and Cons

Pros

Customizing your build -- Fields and measures can represent whatever you want it to.
Transparency -- Everything is translated to SQL in real-time so you know what's going on in the background.
Innovation -- There's a monthly update where new features are regularly released.

Cons

User Management and Sharing Data could be a little easier. Your entire model needs to be built with user permissions in mind.
It's not quite as plug 'n play as the alternatives, but that's okay.
Visualizations could be improved for large amounts of data.
Date reporting could be improved. Date, week, hour, month, etc are separate fields...you can't quickly shift between them in reporting/visualizations.

Alternatives Considered

Tableau Online

Tableau is also a great BI tool, but it felt a lot less flexible to me in terms of customization of data. As a visual platform, Tabluea is incredible; it can produce unbelievably rich visualizations and dashboards. It's also easier to get set up on Tableau too, but ultimately it doesn't have the same data capabilities or flexibility as Looker.

Data Integration

Looker seems to have a lot of compatible data sources. I've seen the integrations vary depending on your database and security. There were instances where we had to SSH into the machine to get it to work. Looker is not built to blend different data sources/databases, however they do have a feature in beta. This would be really nice, but is not critical for us. The real-time nature of Looker is amazing because it just translates everything to SQL and runs queries on the spot.

Collaboration and Sharing

Looker's great about sharing, but collaboration could use some work. Sharing reports is pretty easy. Collaboration does not work on "Looks", but it does work in "Dashboards" and LookML modeling. Access controls are good if your model is built around it, but otherwise Looker could use a little more flexibility with sharing "explores" with users as opposed to entire "models"

Other Software Used

Tableau Desktop

Likelihood to Recommend

Looker is a great solution if making data available is a priority, or if flexibility/customization is really important. Dashboards and visualizations are good, but it's not Looker's strong suit. Looker is also not a tool for blending different datasets, however there's now a beta feature that takes a stab at this. The Looker UI is pretty intuitive from a user perspective.

Looker Feature Ratings

Comments

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Looker's great if you're looking for a customizable solution for making data available to your team