Item: Looker
Rating: 5
Author: Jacob Rasmussen

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Looker was being used by the entire organization. We also wanted to use Looker externally for our merchant dashboards, but that option turned out to be too expensive. We focused more on using it internally by our sales, finance, marketing, and engineering teams to build dashboards that we could use for internal analytics.

Pros and Cons

We were able to create a data model that was consistent with all users.
We were able to customize our dashboards to our needs.

Very simple tasks are very complicated in Looker. It is complicated for users to be able to create their own calculation, as these measures have to be added to the data model.
Very simple calculations are complicated to add to the data model.

Alternatives Considered

Tableau Desktop and Tableau Server

Looker was not as flexible as Tableau, but it provides more customization through code and it provides a consistent data model which can be nice.

Data Integration

We were able to connect to all of our needed data sources, but the connection is not as simple and straightforward as with other tools.

Collaboration and Sharing

It is simple to share dashboards and analytics with other users. It gets a little more complicated when you want other users to view a shared dashboard and have it automatically filtered for them.

Other Software Used

SnapLogic, Snowflake, BambooHR

Likelihood to Recommend

Looker is extremely well suited for a large company that can devote a large number of resources to running and maintaining Looker. It is also great if you have a large analytics initiative and you need a consistent data model in order to avoid different analytics based on the same topic.

A great tool that requires a ton of resources to deploy and maintain

Overall Satisfaction with Looker