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Domo vs Looker comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary
 

Categories and Ranking

IBM Cognos
Sponsored
Average Rating
8.0
Number of Reviews
134
Ranking in other categories
BI (Business Intelligence) Tools (7th), Reporting (4th)
Domo
Average Rating
7.8
Number of Reviews
35
Ranking in other categories
Data Integration (29th), BI (Business Intelligence) Tools (11th), Business Performance Management (13th), Reporting (7th), Data Visualization (6th)
Looker
Average Rating
8.0
Number of Reviews
19
Ranking in other categories
Embedded BI (5th)
 

Mindshare comparison

BI (Business Intelligence) Tools
Embedded BI
 

Featured Reviews

Carlos Larrad Salgado - PeerSpot reviewer
Jul 27, 2022
Improved the quality of our KPIs, while reducing calls to the IT department
I don't like that when we use Colab packages, we get less functionality. For example, you can make groups of data with Excel or with the data sets from the packages, but when you use the Colab packages directly, you can only group the data when you analyze it with Analysis Studio. I think Cognos needs to improve more on this functionality. The user experience is also very important. Cognos is not very easy to understand sometimes, especially when they change the layout but keep the functionality the same. The help is not very graphic and they have no examples. Cognos has to make a big effort to help with understanding the functionality by improving the documentation. There is a lot of documentation, but the examples are hard to find and they should make their help section easier to understand for non-technical users.
James John Wilson - PeerSpot reviewer
Jul 21, 2022
Robust, powerful, and easy to use
There were very few cases on some of the tables, the data tables, where I wish there was an additional feature or two. However, they were particular. What I wanted to see was the ability to collapse when you group a set of rows, let's say when you group them by status or health, so you have your red projects grouped up top. I wanted to compress or collapse that group of red and then open the yellow projects and then the green projects. There were a bit more features in the tables than I wanted to see. They have a widget that you can use either in Microsoft PowerPoint to pull over data into your PowerPoints and refresh graphs or charts or metrics or tables. I would love to see that available in Google Slides. I used it successfully in PowerPoint; however, at one company, they were only using Google products, and so that widget didn't help with reporting in slides. Therefore, we had to do a bit more manual work for our quarterly business reviews or monthly business reviews to produce our executive presentations. Sometimes the fonts were difficult to read if you're trying to put a lot of data in a table and show a lot of rows. Sometimes the fonts got too light, and you had to really play with it to try and figure out how to make it readable. One thing I had to do, and I don't know if it's necessarily a bad thing, was when I was running a meeting, I would have to go turn off the data jobs. If I was running a meeting and a lot of times people were scrambling in the background to do their updates even as the meeting was occurring, it would cause the page to render very slowly. It would sometimes pause or freeze. I found that if I went and turned off the status, the data update jobs that we're pulling data from Smartsheet, then the meetings would work more smoothly, and there were no interruptions or delays.
Subramani R - PeerSpot reviewer
Oct 5, 2022
The APIs are exposed at every level, so it's highly modular
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.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"IBM Cognos improves the effectiveness of the sales team."
"Using custom controls, it is possible to extend the application with even more functionality and make the application intuitive and attractive."
"Cognos is the best application with dashboards,batch reporting, jobs, events and ad-hoc reporting for business users."
"The main difference that I like about Cognos compared to other solutions is its data splitting functionality. We have all our company data inside the Cognos environment and so we prefer to split the information Cognos itself. It's more efficient this way."
"The most valuable feature is developing reports from different data sources, making it a reliable data source."
"The basic platform comes with several meta-modelling tools."
"For planning, forecasting, in-boxing, modeling in general and for predicting numbers and doing work analysis, they are excellent."
"The solution's most valuable feature is its ease of use, which makes it easily compatible with other tools."
"The best feature of Domo is that it's completely on the cloud. I also like that you can handle data end-to-end without having to depend on multiple tools. Another specific feature I like the most about Domo is Magic ETL because, through it, you can do all your expression, transformation, and loading activities very smoothly. The tool also follows the lineage concept, so you can understand what kind of transformations took place on a particular data set. You can find end-to-end data from the source until it has become the final output or the final data set. Whatever happened to a particular data set, you can understand it through the Domo lineage, and that isn't possible in most of the tools available in the market, but in Domo, that's available. The tool is also solid and because it's on the cloud, it uses multiple data engineering in the backend and multiple algorithms in the back, behind the scenes, resulting in a great performance. For example, if an end user such as the CEO or COO opens a report or the dashboard and it takes more than ten seconds, the end user won't be interested in looking at that report or dashboard, but Domo enables better performance and there's usually no performance issues from that tool."
"All our client SLAs and daily and weekly dashboards are tracked on Domo."
"We've worked with all the features of Domo. Among the most important are Pivot and Sumo Cards. We can use drill-down from the top-most level with a click, generating charts."
"In Workbench 5, they have come up with a very useful feature called Upsert. When you're pushing data into the data set, if the data is already available it will update the data, and if that the data is not there it will insert it. That is a beneficial feature that they introduced in the latest version."
"The data certification feature, where the admin user can put a certified stamp on a data source so that other users can know that that is the correct and accurate data flow or data source to use, is a good feature."
"Using the "cards" which function as preconfigured reports or views. I use many of them simultaneously on an organized page, with filters that allow me to see high-level information as well as subsets across the dataset, in a few clicks. Many Excel-challenged users love to use this product for its simplicity."
"In general, Domo is very powerful and very easy to use, relatively speaking."
"Domo is not a difficult tool to learn. All you need to know is the SQL for the ETL part. You don't need to write much code. That's the great part. It uses legacy languages, like SQL, which is very common among developers who then don't have to go and learn Domo's own syntax. Therefore, you don't have to learn another hard language to use Domo."
"We can centralize all our data models."
"The product is easy to use."
"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."
"With Looker, I have experienced benefits in terms of usability and shareability."
"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."
 

Cons

"They should provide improved visual reporting."
"I would like to see is more easy building, movement in the reports, and dashboard functionality within reporting. Overall more simple elements within reports. If the elements are simple then you don't have to render a full page, but you can move separate parts in the page."
"It is a costly product; it is comparatively expensive."
"I would like for the platform to become more standard. If we make a development on our report and our dashboard, it will not be used in another solution. That means there is no portability for the developers."
"Extending features on dashboards so it becomes a real dashboard building application, not only a data exploration tool."
"They were lacking in the initial phases of development in the area of big data, and they still need to improve that aspect of the product."
"I would like to see the introduction of mapbooks for supporting some geographical information."
"It would be good if the solution had conditional formatting."
"I would like to be able to drill down more when there is a particular area where there is a problem. I don't clearly see that in Domo at the moment."
"I would like to see better data intake."
"The preconfigured apps need to be more relevant to allow one, out of the box, to load data in order to use pre-set reports/views."
"When you're exporting a graph out of Domo — suppose it is in the form of a donut chart or it is in form of a stack — the data comes out in tabular format, not as a graph. When exporting the data, I would like them to create a tab for graphs and another tab with the data in tabular format."
"It's quite slow. We are using about 2,000,000 rows of data. Creating certain reports takes almost a couple of minutes, which should not be the case."
"There were very few cases on some of the tables, the data tables, where I wish there was an additional feature or two."
"It is very difficult too, if we do have specific requests or errors that we can't get figure out - especially when it comes to the development platform, developing custom connectors or doing any kind of API work, custom cards - in that there's a lag in the response time."
"Their STK is not up to date and you can't access it on their website. They have a private STK to access resources in Domo."
"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 visualization capability of the product is limited."
"It needs to be more user-friendly."
"Stability needs improvement."
"The integration with different databases must be improved."
"Integrations with other BI tools could be better."
"The product does not have documented material."
"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."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Cognos is super expensive compared to Tableau ($70/month) and Power BI ($20/month) — I think Cognos is roughly $200 a month."
"IBM Cognos offers competitive pricing similar to other BI vendors in the market."
"It's more expensive than similar solutions like Tableau and Power BI."
"It is averagely priced."
"The pricing of this product is meant for medium to large-scale enterprises."
"The pricing and licensing policies are comparatively cheaper than other products in the market ."
"I rate the product price as four or five on a scale from one to ten, where one is a low price, and ten is a high price."
"It is my understanding that the cost is very low. It's not very expensive."
"It started out at about $600 a seat. However, then as we started to grow, it scaled that down to about $330 or 3$50 a seat, if I'm not mistaken."
"I'm not sure about pricing, but I believe Domo is quite costly. Prior to joining this organization, I had a Domo license with my former employer and I think that license was around $500 to $600 annually. That was for a single license. I think it varies, depending on the organization that is acquiring Domo."
"For about 100 users our cost is $95,800."
"The solution is expensive compared to one of its competitors."
"Domo has more than one licensing model. You can choose between the yearly subscription and the per-user licensing model. The tool is flexible in terms of licensing. As for the cost, Domo is an end-to-end BI tool so its pricing is a little higher than other players in the market, for example, non end-to-end BI tools such as OBIEE and Tableau specific only for business intelligence and presenting data to the end users, unlike Domo which handles everything. You want to get Domo as an integration tool, an ETL tool, etc. As the tool is end-to-end, its cost is always going to be a little higher than other BI tools, but it's worth paying because you won't have to spend extra for other activities. After all, Domo can do those activities."
"No matter if you're a developer or an end-user, the licensing cost is around $12 per user per month."
"Domo is slightly costly but it's much cheaper than some."
"The price that they offered was around $200 per user license. It was pretty cheap at that time compared to other companies. I think they have revamped their pricing structure since then."
"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."
"It's not cheap, but it's not expensive for big companies."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Educational Organization
57%
Financial Services Firm
7%
Computer Software Company
5%
Government
4%
Computer Software Company
12%
Manufacturing Company
9%
University
9%
Retailer
7%
Educational Organization
35%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Computer Software Company
10%
Manufacturing Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

Seeking lightweight open source BI software
It depends on the Data architecture and the complexity of your requirement. Some great tools in the market are Qlik ...
What do you like most about IBM Cognos?
The solution's most valuable feature is its ease of use, which makes it easily compatible with other tools.
What needs improvement with IBM Cognos?
I need improvements, particularly with the Framework Manager, which has an outdated user interface from older version...
What do you like most about Domo?
All our client SLAs and daily and weekly dashboards are tracked on Domo.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Domo?
Domo can be crazy expensive. They have a lot of capabilities but depending on the pricing model you have, either the...
What needs improvement with Domo?
If Domo had a Copilot feature, you could interact with the graphs and talk to the graphs and tables.
What do you like most about Looker?
With Looker, I have experienced benefits in terms of usability and shareability.
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 adva...
What needs improvement with Looker?
The visualization capability of the product is limited. From an improvement perspective, the product should have more...
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

Cognos, Cognos Analytics, IBM Cognos Analytics
corda
No data available
 

Learn More

 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

More than 23,000 leading organizations across multiple industries use Cognos. Some examples of Cognos customers include BMW Financial Services, Quinte Health Care, Troy Corporation, Michigan State University, and GKN Land System.
Capco, SABMiller, Stance, eBay, Sage North America, Goodwill Industries of Central Indiana, Telus, The Cliffs, OGIO International Inc., and many more!
Yahoo!, Etsy, Kohler, Hipcamp, Hubspot, Kickstarter, Venmo, Dollar Shave Club, 600+ customer
Find out what your peers are saying about Microsoft, Salesforce, Amazon Web Services (AWS) and others in BI (Business Intelligence) Tools. Updated: October 2024.
814,572 professionals have used our research since 2012.