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Databricks vs Looker comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

Databricks
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
93
Ranking in other categories
Cloud Data Warehouse (6th), Data Science Platforms (1st), Data Management Platforms (DMP) (5th), Streaming Analytics (1st)
Looker
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
19
Ranking in other categories
Embedded BI (10th)
 

Mindshare comparison

While both are Business Intelligence solutions, they serve different purposes. Databricks is designed for Cloud Data Warehouse and holds a mindshare of 10.4%, up 7.7% compared to last year.
Looker, on the other hand, focuses on Embedded BI, holds 6.4% mindshare, down 9.0% since last year.
Cloud Data Warehouse Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Databricks10.4%
Snowflake15.8%
Teradata8.0%
Other65.8%
Cloud Data Warehouse
Embedded BI Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Looker6.4%
Tableau Enterprise17.6%
Qlik Sense8.6%
Other67.4%
Embedded BI
 

Featured Reviews

SimonRobinson - PeerSpot reviewer
Governance And Engagement Lead
Improved data governance has enabled sensitive data tracking but cost management still needs work
I believe we could improve Databricks integration with cloud service providers. The impact of our current integration has not been particularly good, and it's becoming very expensive for us. The inefficiencies in our implementation, such as not shutting down warehouses when they're not in use or reserving the right number of credits, have led to increased costs. We made several beginner mistakes, such as not taking advantage of incremental loading and running overly complicated queries all the time. We should be using ETL tools to help us instead of doing it directly in Databricks. We need more experienced professionals to manage Databricks effectively, as it's not as forgiving as other platforms such as Snowflake. I think introducing customer repositories would facilitate easier implementation with Databricks.
Kishore Jhunjhunwala - PeerSpot reviewer
Sr Analytics Consultant at a outsourcing company with 1,001-5,000 employees
A cloud solution for operational reporting but is expensive
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.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"We can scale the product."
"Databricks is a one-stop shop for everything data related, and it can scale with you."
"The processing capacity is tremendous in the database."
"Databricks offers various courses that I can use, whether it's PySpark, Scala, or R."
"I like the simplicity and ease of use."
"It is fast, it's scalable, and it does the job it needs to do."
"Databricks is quite easy to use and requires less coding and customizations than a solution like AWS SageMaker, enabling more people to efficiently build and host their ML code while leveraging the already integrated MLflow to track and monitor all our different experiments."
"It offers AI functionalities that assist with code management and machine learning processes."
"It is easier and quicker to find things in the database."
"We LOVE Looker here at Snagajob."
"The product is easy to use."
"It is a pretty stable solution because it is a cloud-based product."
"If one has to deal with large volumes of data, which I categorically could tell is big data and has to create visuals, Looker is the tool to go."
"With Looker, I have experienced benefits in terms of usability and shareability."
"In the past, adding a new dashboard to our product was a multi-week development effort, now our nontechnical product management and client success teams can create, launch, and maintain high quality dashboards with no interruption to the development team."
"Technical support is the best ever."
 

Cons

"The product should incorporate more learning aspects. It needs to have a free trial version that the team can practice."
"The query plan is not easy with Databrick's job level. If I want to tune any of the code, it is not easily available in the blogs as well."
"The initial setup of Databricks could be complex."
"This is a fairly expensive solution for any service outside of the basic package, and costs can add up quite quickly if there are large scaling requirements."
"The product cannot be integrated with a popular coding IDE."
"The product could be improved regarding the delay when switching to higher-performing virtual machines compared to other platforms."
"Pricing is one of the things that could be improved. Also, there could be improvement in the visual analytics space there and on the machine learning functions."
"CI/CD needs additional leverage and support."
"Stability needs improvement."
"There have a been a few minor bugs, including a security bug that did not affect us."
"There is a lot of customization that we needed/need to build ourselves. Other BI tools have more out of the box."
"Features related to visualization should continue to be improved."
"Some of the visualizations are a bit limited on how much you can customize them."
"The visualization capability of the product is limited."
"Looker doesn't connect to Excel, which is a huge disappointment because a lot of data is presented in Excel."
"It needs to be more user-friendly."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"We only pay for the Azure compute behind the solution."
"The billing of Databricks can be difficult and should improve."
"The price is okay. It's competitive."
"I do not exactly know the costs, but one of our clients pays between $100 USD and $200 USD monthly."
"It is an expensive tool. The licensing model is a pay-as-you-go one."
"I rate the price of Databricks as eight out of ten."
"Databricks uses a price-per-use model, where you can use as much compute as you need."
"My smallest project is around a hundred euros, and my most expensive is just under a thousand euros a week. That is based on terabytes of data processed each month."
"It's not cheap, but it's not expensive for big companies."
"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."
"I do not have to make any payments to use the solution."
"It is cheap."
"Looker is expensive and could be made better by reducing it."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
17%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Computer Software Company
8%
Healthcare Company
6%
Financial Services Firm
13%
Retailer
9%
Computer Software Company
9%
Media Company
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business27
Midsize Enterprise12
Large Enterprise56
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business5
Midsize Enterprise8
Large Enterprise6
 

Questions from the Community

Which do you prefer - Databricks or Azure Machine Learning Studio?
Databricks gives you the option of working with several different languages, such as SQL, R, Scala, Apache Spark, or Python. It offers many different cluster choices and excellent integration with ...
How would you compare Databricks vs Amazon SageMaker?
We researched AWS SageMaker, but in the end, we chose Databricks. Databricks is a Unified Analytics Platform designed to accelerate innovation projects. It is based on Spark so it is very fast. It...
Which would you choose - Databricks or Azure Stream Analytics?
Databricks is an easy-to-set-up and versatile tool for data management, analysis, and business analytics. For analytics teams that have to interpret data to further the business goals of their orga...
Ask a question
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Comparisons

 

Also Known As

Databricks Unified Analytics, Databricks Unified Analytics Platform, Redash
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Elsevier, MyFitnessPal, Sharethrough, Automatic Labs, Celtra, Radius Intelligence, Yesware
Yahoo!, Etsy, Kohler, Hipcamp, Hubspot, Kickstarter, Venmo, Dollar Shave Club, 600+ customer
Find out what your peers are saying about Snowflake Computing, Microsoft, Teradata and others in Cloud Data Warehouse. Updated: February 2026.
884,933 professionals have used our research since 2012.