Item: Looker
Rating: 9
Author: Verified User

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We are using Looker throughout the whole company. We decided to use it after careful consideration and even considering building the tool internally but realized it was going to be too expensive and time-consuming. We use it for building all sorts of reports and tracking and to do data validation.

Pros and Cons

Great place to combine all your data and make sources talk to each other.
The dashboard building is very easy and gives you a chance to create and judge any data you need.
With the reports, you can set up a save and then have them emailed to you automatically. It is a fantastic way of not having to recreate things all the time.

It takes quite a bit of time to set up initially and the onboarding process is long.
You need to have an internal team that is dedicated to just setting it up and getting the rest of the people on board.
The reports take some time to build initially and it's not overly intuitive.

Alternatives Considered

Sisense

It was cheaper and less complicated. We were not ready to just into something as big as Sisense and quite frankly didn't need that level of product at the time. We also considered building our own tool but eventually realized that would be way more time and effort consuming so we went with Looker.

Data Integration

It was relatively easy to connect the data to Looker. Like I mentioned earlier it did require us to dedicate a few people to specifically doing that but it is also because we didn't have the data sources organized before and needed to do the original work. We also had to make sure it all made sense once it was implemented so the testing took some time.

Collaboration and Sharing

Super easy to share looks and reports. Love the ability to schedule reports and dashboards to be delivered to me or other team members. Love that it updates them automatically and I don't have to go in and re-run them every single time I need them. Looks are easy to find and navigate and make private as well.

Other Software Used

Mailchimp, Airtable, Jira Service Desk

Likelihood to Recommend

It is great if you have a lot of data sources and are struggling to keep them in one place where you can also analyze it. Looker is great for helping create and keep track of data and reports that might be coming from many different places. On the other hand, if you are already using something that helps create reports and analyze data while not having many data sources, this might not be as useful.

Great robust product that helps scale

Overall Satisfaction with Looker