Looker Reviews

Name: Looker
Brand: Google
Rating: 4 (19 reviews)

Vendor: Google

4.0 out of 5

19 reviews
80% willing to recommend

2,167 followers

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What is Looker?

Looker is a powerful data analytics platform that empowers businesses to explore and analyze their data in real time.

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Looker is the #5 ranked solution in top Embedded BI Tools. PeerSpot users give Looker an average rating of 8.0 out of 10. Looker is most commonly compared to Microsoft Power BI: Looker vs Microsoft Power BI. Looker is popular among the large enterprise segment, accounting for 45% of users researching this solution on PeerSpot. The top industry researching this solution are professionals from a educational organization, accounting for 35% of all views.

Helped 814,649 peers since 2012

Featured reviews

Subramani R

Software Data Engineer at PayPal

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. You can't create very attractive visuals with the built-in features, but I think they're providing some extensions to develop different visualizations. Looker can't create multiple sheets. You can only create one dashboard. It's not that you're able to toggle through different sheets to navigate different visuals. It's just one and people have to scroll through the dashboard. So scrolling is not something that people generally like to do, rather than segregating them in multiple tabs of sheets.

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Kishore Jhunjhunwala

Sr Analytics Consultant at a tech vendor with 1,001-5,000 employees

Some basic feature that is available in other reporting tools is missing. Looker has the ability to show more than 5,000 rows for operational reporting. Some reporting tools allow users to scroll down to see more than 5,000 rows, but in Looker, you have to download the entire dataset. Looker should consider adding a scroll-down option to allow users to view large datasets on screen without downloading them. Looker has some options for granting users access as viewers. However, viewers cannot download the entire dataset. Only superusers can download the whole dataset on the Explore screen. This is a big limitation, as you cannot give any user viewer access. You can give access to superuser access, which is a cost to the company.

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Dmitri Solodovnik

Business Intelligence Team Lead at Oxagile

Integrations with other BI tools could be better. Big companies are using different tools and different stacks. Also, the plan and roadmap should be more transparent. This would allow end users to correlate or plan company features and align them with Looker's plans and features. Support is generally good, particularly the online support where you can quickly chat with an engineer to resolve questions. However, for more complicated issues, like a cache issue we encountered for embedded networks, the resolution can lag. Issues can remain unsolved for a while. The process of raising a product feature can also be lengthy.

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Looker mindshare

As of November 2024, the mindshare of Looker in the Embedded BI category stands at 25.9%, up from 24.5% compared to the previous year, according to calculations based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Embedded BI

Key learnings from peers

Valuable Features

The most valuable features of Looker include its ability to generate optimal SQL queries through user interface actions, its compatibility with Google Cloud's BigQuery, its design with microservices architecture in mind, and its flexibility for developers.

The solution is stable and easy to set up, with helpful community support.

The sales team is also praised for their professionalism.

"With Looker, I have experienced benefits in terms of usability and shareability."
"It's quite effortless to navigate through various applications and review their updated data in real-time."
"It is a pretty stable solution because it is a cloud-based product."

Room for Improvement

Improvements needed for Looker include expanding its data sources to connect with Excel and REST APIs, enhancing the ability to create attractive visuals, allowing for the creation of multiple sheets or dashboards, improving interactivity and user-friendliness, providing a better user interface, offering freely available training on platforms like YouTube, increasing marketing efforts, and establishing a distinct position in the market.

"The visualization capability of the product is limited."
"Stability needs improvement."
"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."

ROI

The ROI has been significant for many users.

Pricing

Looker's pricing is slightly less expensive compared to Power BI and is in the same range as its competitors. They may offer discounts for larger organizations. The pricing for Tableau is more expensive. Looker's solution is generally considered cost-efficient.

"I do not have to make any payments to use the solution."
"It is cheap."
"The price of Looker usually depends on the solution's provider, but it is usually cheaper than the other products in the market. Looker is offered at different prices for different companies."

Popular Use Cases

Looker is utilized to generate dashboards for stakeholders, enabling data aggregation and visualization for drawing conclusions. It is employed by a large number of developers and business analysts, including usage with clients.

The tool aids in creating executive dashboards, providing improved insights and visualizations for businesses. The primary purpose of the developed dashboard is to monitor sales and marketing progress, ultimately offering companies enhanced insights. Specific use cases cannot be disclosed.

Service and Support

Customers have generally had a positive experience with Looker's customer service and support. The support team may not always have the exact answer, yet they are helpful. Community support is also mentioned as being very helpful.

Deployment

Setting up Looker is not difficult and can be done in about a day. However, onboarding different teams and enforcing security policies can take a significant amount of time.

The initial setup process is described as decent and easy.

Scalability

The scalability of Looker's solution is considered good, especially compared to Tableau which tends to slow down as data size increases. The potential for scalability depends on the components being used, as a highly scalable solution can be achieved if the components are both scalable and performant.

Stability

Looker is a stable product, although it is still relatively new compared to other BI platforms like Tableau.

Looker has an advantage in its integration with BigQuery, allowing it to efficiently query large amounts of data.

Looker is great for dealing with big data and creating visuals, while other BI platforms may be more suitable for smaller volumes of data.

These insights are based on the in-depth reviews provided by peers to help you make a better buying decision.

Download our Looker Buyer's Guide for additional reliable information.

Review data by company size

By reviewers

By visitors reading reviews

Top industries

By visitors reading reviews

Educational Organization

35%

Financial Services Firm

10%

Computer Software Company

10%

Manufacturing Company

Healthcare Company

University

Media Company

Retailer

Government

Legal Firm

Insurance Company

Real Estate/Law Firm

Logistics Company

Comms Service Provider

Energy/Utilities Company

Construction Company

Non Profit

Hospitality Company

Recreational Facilities/Services Company

Transportation Company

Consumer Goods Company

Wholesaler/Distributor

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Learn more about Looker

With its intuitive interface and robust features, Looker enables users to easily create and share interactive dashboards, reports, and visualizations.

The product's advanced data modeling capabilities and seamless integration with popular data sources make it a top choice for organizations looking to gain valuable insights from their data.