Item: Looker
Rating: 8
Author: Verified User

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Looker is being used by one department. Currently, it is being used for viewing internal data but it is being tested for a rollout to clients.

Pros and Cons

The modeling layer adds flexibility to how we can manipulate data before we show it.
Easy to connect to Snowflake.
Drill down feature is useful.

Could use the drill down feature to another chart instead of a table.
Navigation from explores to dashboard is cumbersome.
Need richer pivot features: hide certain pivot columns from charts.

Alternatives Considered

Sisense, Tableau Desktop and Periscope Data

Most of the other BI tools are fairly similar in terms of charting capabilities and performance. Looker stands out with its modeling layer and SQL free end-user interface. It also has a feature-rich API enabling you to embed Looker into your own web app to customize it further for clients.

Data Integration

It's fairly easy to connect to Snowflake and other data sources and to create models from different databases.

Collaboration and Sharing

It's easy to share Looker dashboards via links and also to set up email/Slack integrations.

Likelihood to Recommend

Looker is well suited for use as a BI tool and, in my opinion, is a sleeker and user-friendly alternative to Tableau. It is great for visualizing data with minimal setup and minimal SQL knowledge for analysts. If your analysts are tech savvy and are comfortable with SQL there might be cheaper alternatives to Looker.

Great BI tool with a data modeling layer and version control

Overall Satisfaction with Looker