We performed a comparison between Looker and MicroStrategy based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two Embedded BI solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI.
"I would rate the stability a ten out of ten. I didn't face any issues with stability."
"With Looker, I have experienced benefits in terms of usability and shareability."
"Looker allows you to generate the most optimal SQL queries in a DC through UI actions. We had signed a contract with Google Cloud to use BigQuery. That was the primary reason we adopted Looker. It works better with BigQuery than any other BI platform. We also like how this tool was developed. It was designed with an eye toward microservices architecture."
"The stability of Looker has been good since I have been using it. However, it depends on what components are being used."
"The product is easy to use."
"From a developer's perspective, the way the functionality's being handled is great."
"We can centralize all our data models."
"It's quite effortless to navigate through various applications and review their updated data in real-time."
"I have shown our users how to stop using Excel. They would create these vast Excel files, and I showed them how to do the same thing with MicroStrategy, which saves a significant amount of time for them everyday."
"I find MicroStrategy the most suited to the enterprise-wide BI platform, because of its scalability and stability."
"The usability for users to be able to drag and drop, then create their own reports."
"It is a good tool to help our customers visually see loads of data."
"Having the intelligence server sit in the middle is huge for us. It is going to save us a lot of time, make our work a lot simpler, make it easier for deployment, and getting the reports in the hands of our users sooner."
"It's useful if you need to create dashboards that you check every day. Also, we can create a queue, but it will be updated every day with scheduled updates."
"Technical support has sent us to rapid response before, when we really needed them."
"It plays a vital role in establishing a connection with predictive continuous improvement."
"Stability needs improvement."
"Integrations with other BI tools could be better."
"The product does not have documented material."
"Looker doesn't connect to Excel, which is a huge disappointment because a lot of data is presented in Excel. Also, it can't consume data directly from REST APIs, which is necessary. Looker needs to expand its horizons when it comes to data sources. The inability to connect to different data sources is hampering our use cases. Currently, it only has an ODBC connection that connects to a database. It needs to connect to other data sources, such as Excel, APIs, and different platforms."
"The main area of concern in Looker is probably related to blending the data from the different sources, including the data present internally in the company and on the cloud."
"It needs to be more user-friendly."
"The visualization capability of the product is limited."
"The integration with different databases must be improved."
"Consolidate the functional offering to be more concise in the front-end for web reports, dashboards, and self-service."
"With Cube partition (v10.1 and above) scalability has not been an issue, but the Cube publish time, and temporary space consumption while the Cube is being published, has almost doubled during implementation of Cube partition."
"MicroStrategy's mobile dashboard is still not a RESTful design."
"It crashes multiple times for even small changes that I make on the fly in the dashboard. After doing all the necessary changes, the MicroStrategy desktop or even the web version kicks the users out, and all the changes are lost. This functionality is buggy in MicroStrategy. It is hard to keep track of all the changes that I have done before. I don't want to make copies of each change that I have made because I would end up creating a hundred dashboards. It is not feasible in a real environment. I haven't worked on integrating MicroStrategy with the cloud. I am not sure how it behaves in the cloud, but I have heard from a few of my friends that there are some hiccups when you kind of sync to the cloud through MicroStrategy."
"They need to supply the support system that's just not there right now. They don't have Enterprise Manager classes. You need in-depth classes to understand what those metrics are doing, to understand the table associations from one to the other. You can't just go and pick it up and understand that DT_DAY connects to all of these tables, without going into Architect, looking at the source tables. I, as a analyst, a slightly technical user, I don't have the expertise to do that. Business users definitely don't have the expertise to do that."
"If you do not learn the ins or outs, it can be a difficult tool to use. You could do a PoC and get enough out of it to be able to use it. However, when it comes to administering it, you definitely need the training."
"The product could be improved by adding additional visualization."
"Data preparation-wise, it was not so straightforward with respect to getting different sources. Preparing or transforming the data inside and then bringing it onto the dashboard was a bit difficult, and the experience could have been better."
Looker is ranked 5th in Embedded BI with 19 reviews while MicroStrategy is ranked 4th in Embedded BI with 155 reviews. Looker is rated 8.0, while MicroStrategy is rated 8.2. The top reviewer of Looker writes "The APIs are exposed at every level, so it's highly modular". On the other hand, the top reviewer of MicroStrategy writes "A robust solution for powerful data analytics". Looker is most compared with Amazon QuickSight, Tableau, Google Data Studio, Databricks and Alteryx, whereas MicroStrategy is most compared with Microsoft Power BI, Tableau, IBM Cognos, SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform and SAP Analytics Cloud. See our Looker vs. MicroStrategy report.
See our list of best Embedded BI vendors.
We monitor all Embedded BI reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.
