Looker is the tool you're looking for... if you can afford it.
September 18, 2019

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

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

Overall Satisfaction with Looker

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

  • 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

Cons

  • 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
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.
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.
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.
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 Feature Ratings

BI Platform ()
Not Rated
Supported Data Sources ()
Not Rated
10.0
Pixel Perfect reports
10
Customizable dashboards
10
Report Formatting Templates
10
10.0
Drill-down analysis
10
Formatting capabilities
10
Integration with R or other statistical packages
Not Rated
Report sharing and collaboration
10
10.0
Publish to Web
10
Publish to PDF
10
Report Versioning
Not Rated
Report Delivery Scheduling
10
10.0
Pre-built visualization formats (heatmaps, scatter plots etc.)
10
Location Analytics / Geographic Visualization
10
10.0
Multi-User Support (named login)
10
Role-Based Security Model
10
Multiple Access Permission Levels (Create, Read, Delete)
10
10.0
Responsive Design for Web Access
10
Dashboard / Report / Visualization Interactivity on Mobile
10
Application Program Interfaces (APIs) / Embedding ()
Not Rated

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