Databricks vs Looker comparison

The compared Databricks and Google solutions aren't in the same category. Databricks is ranked #9 in CDW , with an average rating of 8.4, and holds a 8.3% mindshare in the category. Google is ranked #6 in EBT , with an average rating of 8.0, and holds a 8.2% mindshare. Additionally, 96% of Databricks users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 80% of Google users who would recommend it.

Databricks

Read 91 Databricks reviews

22,527 Views
2,027 Comparison Views

96% willing to recommend

Looker

Read 19 Looker reviews

2,819 Views
930 Comparison Views

80% willing to recommend

Databricks

Looker

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between Databricks and Looker based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out what your peers are saying about Snowflake Computing, Microsoft, Google and others in Cloud Data Warehouse.

To learn more, read our detailed Cloud Data Warehouse Report (Updated: August 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Cloud Data Warehouse

August 2025

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Helped 867,783 peers since 2012

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

Ranking in other categories

Cloud Data Warehouse (9th), Data Science Platforms (1st), Streaming Analytics (1st)

Looker

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

7.0

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Embedded BI (6th)

Mindshare comparison

While both are Business Intelligence solutions, they serve different purposes. Databricks is designed for Cloud Data Warehouse and holds a mindshare of 8.3%, up 5.6% compared to last year.
Looker, on the other hand, focuses on Embedded BI, holds 8.2% mindshare, down 11.3% since last year.

Cloud Data Warehouse Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
Databricks	8.3%
Snowflake	17.7%
Dremio	9.4%
Other	64.6%

Cloud Data Warehouse

Embedded BI Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
Looker	8.2%
Tableau Enterprise	27.4%
Qlik Sense	12.0%
Other	52.400000000000006%

Embedded BI

Featured Reviews

ShubhamSharma7

Data Engineer at a engineering company with 1,001-5,000 employees

Capability to integrate diverse coding languages in a single notebook greatly enhances workflow

Databricks offers various courses that I can use, whether it's PySpark, Scala, or R. I can leverage all these courses in a single notebook, which is beneficial for clients as they can access various tools in one place whenever needed. This is quite significant. I usually work with PySpark based on client requirements. After coding, I feed the Databricks notebooks into the ADF pipeline for updates. Databricks' capability to process data in parallel enhances data processing speed. Furthermore, I can connect our Databricks notebook directly with Power BI and other visualization tools like Qlik. Once we develop code, it allows us to transform raw data into visualizations for clients using analysis diagrams, which is very helpful.

Read full review

Kishore Jhunjhunwala

Sr Analytics Consultant at a tech vendor 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.

Read full review

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The solution is built from Spark and has integration with MLflow, which is important for our use case."

"The most valuable feature of Databricks is the integration of the data warehouse and data lake, and the development of the lake house. Additionally, it integrates well with Spark for processing data in production."

"I would rate them ten out of ten."

"What I like about Databricks is that it's one of the most popular platforms that give access to folks who are trying not just to do exploratory work on the data but also go ahead and build advanced modeling and machine learning on top of that."

"Databricks has improved my organization by allowing us to transform data from sources to a different format and feed that to the analytics, business intelligence, and reporting teams. This tool makes it easy to do those kinds of things."

"I think Databricks is very good at facilitating AI and machine learning projects; they implement AI and machine learning models very well, and clients can run their models on Databricks."

"It can send out large data amounts."

"The most valuable feature is the Spark cluster which is very fast for heavy loads, big data processing and Pi Spark."

More Databricks pros

"I would rate the stability a ten out of ten. I didn't face any issues with stability."

"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."

"It is a pretty stable solution because it is a cloud-based product."

"We can centralize all our data models."

"From a developer's perspective, the way the functionality's being handled is great."

"It's quite effortless to navigate through various applications and review their updated data in real-time."

"With Looker, I have experienced benefits in terms of usability and shareability."

More Looker pros

Cons

"The product should provide more advanced features in future releases."

"Databricks has added some alerts and query functionality into their SQL persona, but the whole SQL persona, which is like a role, needs a lot of development. The alerts are not very flexible, and the query interface itself is not as polished as the notebook interface that is used through the data science and machine learning persona. It is clunky at present."

"In my opinion, areas of Databricks that have room for improvement involve the dashboards. Until recently, everyone used third-party systems such as Power BI to connect to Databricks for dashboards and reports, but they're now coming up with their IBI dashboard, and I think they're on the right track to improve that even further."

"There could be more support for automated machine learning in the database. I would like to see more ways to do analysis so that the reporting is more understandable."

"As a data engineer, I see cluster failure in our Databricks user databases as a major issue."

"Some of the error messages that we receive are too vague, saying things like "unknown exception", and these should be improved to make it easier for developers to debug problems."

"The integration and query capabilities can be improved."

"Would be helpful to have additional licensing options."

More Databricks cons

"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."

"Stability needs improvement."

"Integrations with other BI tools could be better."

"The product does not have documented material."

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Licensing on site I would counsel against, as on-site hardware issues tend to really delay and slow down delivery."

"We pay as we go, so there isn't a fixed price. It's charged by the unit. I don't have any details detail about how they measure this, but it should be a mix between processing and quantity of data handled. We run a simulation based on our use cases, which gives us an estimate. We've been monitoring this, and the costs have met our expectations."

"The cost for Databricks depends on the use case. I work on it as a consultant, so I'm using the client's Databricks, so it depends on how big the client is."

"The basic version of this solution is now open-source, so there are no license costs involved. However, there is a charge for any advanced functionality and this can be quite expensive."

"We only pay for the Azure compute behind the solution."

"The solution uses a pay-per-use model with an annual subscription fee or package. Typically this solution is used on a cloud platform, such as Azure or AWS, but more people are choosing Azure because the price is more reasonable."

"The price of Databricks is reasonable compared to other solutions."

"The licensing costs of Databricks depend on how many licenses we need, depending on which Databricks provides a lot of discounts."

More Databricks pricing and cost advice

"It is cheap."

"It's not cheap, but it's not expensive for big companies."

"Looker is expensive and could be made better by reducing it."

"I do not have to make any payments to use the solution."

"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."

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

17%

Computer Software Company

10%

Manufacturing Company

Healthcare Company

Financial Services Firm

14%

Computer Software Company

12%

Retailer

Manufacturing Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	25
Midsize Enterprise	12
Large Enterprise	56

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	5
Midsize Enterprise	8
Large Enterprise	6

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 ...

See all answers

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...

See all answers

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...

See all answers

What do you like most about Looker?

With Looker, I have experienced benefits in terms of usability and shareability.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Looker?

I do not have to make any payments to use the solution. In the beginning, Looker may work fine for its users. If advanced users who have experience with BI tools use Looker, then they may find it t...

See all answers

What needs improvement with Looker?

The visualization capability of the product is limited. From an improvement perspective, the product should have more visualization capability. I can't clean data in Looker, and if I try to do it, ...

See all answers

Comparisons

Dataiku vs Databricks

Compared 9% of the time

Microsoft Power BI vs Databricks

Compared 9% of the time

Informatica PowerCenter vs Databricks

Compared 7% of the time

Dremio vs Databricks

Compared 6% of the time

Tableau Enterprise vs Databricks

Compared 5% of the time

More Databricks Competitors

Microsoft Power BI vs Looker

Compared 12% of the time

Tableau Enterprise vs Looker

Compared 12% of the time

Qlik Sense vs Looker

Compared 9% of the time

IBM Cognos vs Looker

Compared 7% of the time

MicroStrategy vs Looker

Compared 7% of the time

More Looker Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Databricks

September 2025

Download Databricks product report

Buyer's Guide

Looker

September 2025

Download Looker product report

Also Known As

Databricks Unified Analytics, Databricks Unified Analytics Platform, Redash

No data available

Overview

Databricks is utilized for advanced analytics, big data processing, machine learning models, ETL operations, data engineering, streaming analytics, and integrating multiple data sources.

Organizations leverage Databricks for predictive analysis, data pipelines, data science, and unifying data architectures. It is also used for consulting projects, financial reporting, and creating APIs. Industries like insurance, retail, manufacturing, and pharmaceuticals use Databricks for data management and analytics due to its user-friendly interface, built-in machine learning libraries, support for multiple programming languages, scalability, and fast processing.

What are the key features of Databricks?

User-friendly interface: Simplifies operations and usability.
Built-in machine learning libraries: Facilitates machine learning tasks.
Support for multiple programming languages: Enhances flexibility.
Scalability: Efficiently handles growing data needs.
Fast processing: Improves performance and speed.
Automated optimization: Reduces manual efforts.
Data visualization: Provides insightful visuals.
Collaborative features: Enhances teamwork.
Delta Lake performance: Boosts data management.
Seamless cluster management: Simplifies system operations.

What are the benefits or ROI to look for in Databricks reviews?

Efficiency in handling large datasets: Ensures smooth processing.
Interactive workspace environment: Improves user collaboration.
Integration with platforms: Provides connectivity benefits.
Performance optimization: Enhances overall system performance.
Support for data governance and security: Ensures data integrity and protection.

Databricks is implemented in insurance for risk analysis and claims processing; in retail for customer analytics and inventory management; in manufacturing for predictive maintenance and supply chain optimization; and in pharmaceuticals for drug discovery and patient data analysis. Users value its scalability, machine learning support, collaboration tools, and Delta Lake performance but seek improvements in visualization, pricing, and integration with BI tools.

Databricks

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

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.

Google

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, Google and others in Cloud Data Warehouse. Updated: August 2025.

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