Looker is pretty good for the price
April 07, 2021

Looker is pretty good for the price

Joe Hughes | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Looker

We use Looker across the whole organization. It is used for integrated reporting (known as Looks) for delivery via email or GUI. Our company uses it for its own reports and we also publish customer-facing reports with it, on a daily basis. Essentially, it is a delivery program and some other things for our ETL process.
  • Provides interesting data, provided the databases exist for it to be sliced.
  • Delivery system is relatively easy to use.
  • Customers can pick up the report creation pretty quickly.
  • API is difficult to use, especially with auth problems.
  • The LookMLs can be confusing with referenced objects.
  • Maintaining on-prem servers requires a lot of maintenance.
  • In the cloud the data writes slowly.
  • Positive - Reporting has drawn in more customers and helped us develop deeper relationships.
  • Negative - Looker had some bugs in its earlier iterations which caused some serious failures.
  • Negative - Upgrading Looker on prem can be tricky.
  • Positive - If you start with Looker in the cloud, it is relatively easy to maintain.
Looker is cheaper, by far. Easier to manage. In the end, Looker was a better choice for us, even with its maintenance warts and the headaches with the APIs. Tableau licensing is difficult to manage, at the very least, whereas Looker is not. User management is much easier to manage within Looker.

Do you think Looker delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with Looker's feature set?

Yes

Did Looker live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of Looker go as expected?

No

Would you buy Looker again?

Yes

Looker is relatively easy to use, even as it is set up. The customers for the front-end only have issues with the initial setup for looker ml creations. Other "looks" are relatively easy to set up, depending on the ETL and the data which is coming into Looker on a regular basis.
Actual Looker "premium" support is not too bad. They are responsive to issues and the only issues we have really had in the past is explaining our setup or providing access to our on-prem setup. Looker support is probably seen by others as above average. Multiple tickets have been resolved by them for us within a day.
For less evolved reporting, it is not bad at all. It is not designed to scale, fully. I mean that as long as you do not intend to scale, it is a good product for your company. Log aggregation level reporting is not suited for Looker. Customer facing data reporting is. As long as the reporting is not too multi-dimensional, Looker is good.

Looker Feature Ratings

Pixel Perfect reports
4
Customizable dashboards
8
Report Formatting Templates
8
Drill-down analysis
6
Formatting capabilities
7
Integration with R or other statistical packages
7
Report sharing and collaboration
8
Publish to Web
7
Publish to PDF
7
Report Versioning
7
Report Delivery Scheduling
8
Pre-built visualization formats (heatmaps, scatter plots etc.)
6
Location Analytics / Geographic Visualization
6
Multi-User Support (named login)
7
Role-Based Security Model
6
Multiple Access Permission Levels (Create, Read, Delete)
7
Responsive Design for Web Access
6
Dashboard / Report / Visualization Interactivity on Mobile
6