Item: Looker
Rating: 10
Author: Verified User

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We're currently using Looker to peer into our own organization's internal data which is contained in our data warehouse. Looker is now used by everyone within our company in order to have operational insights across operations, finance, sales... all the way to the C-suite. We've been very impressed.

Pros and Cons

It's on-demand and in the cloud, we don't have to mess with AMIs or scaling issues
Looker's data domain creating tool is better than anything we've seen
LookML, Looker's specialized language is incredibly extensible and allows us to connect and visualize almost any data type

Looker is expensive
Looker's solution is pretty much set, they come out with new features, but because it's hosted, you don't have a ton of extensibility
Creating public dashboards seem a bit difficult

Alternatives Considered

TIBCO Jaspersoft, Pentaho and Power BI For Office 365

Looker was, hands down, better than any other products we looked at. It was far easier to get started and keep moving because of Looker's internal programming language and data definition language, LookML. We were up and going in just a few days and were creating advanced analytics the same day we got started after reading the LookML docs. Now, we have a pretty sharp team of programmers (I'm a former programmer by trade). I was even able to get started very, very quickly.

Data Integration

We primarily use PostgreSQL and AWS Redshift. But we've been able to connect it to almost any data source we've thrown at it. The ability to merge datasets across different disjointed systems at scale is pretty amazing.

Collaboration and Sharing

You have the ability, out of the box, to share a view (they call it a Look) or a dashboard with any named user or to publish it to SFTP, email, the web, etc. We've used that functionality heavily, especially considering that the view is scoped to that user's access abilities.

Other Software Used

PostgreSQL, Amazon Redshift, Segment, Customer.io

Likelihood to Recommend

If you're a company who's been in business for a few years, and can afford a Looker license, then I wouldn't really look anywhere else. We've looked at a TON of data analytics/BI tools over the years and Looker is, by far, the best we've seen. However, that comes with a cost. If you're a new startup, Looker probably isn't appropriate for you because of the cost.

Looker is the tool you're looking for... if you can afford it.

Overall Satisfaction with Looker