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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
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
36
Ranking in other categories
Data Integration (30th), BI (Business Intelligence) Tools (11th), Business Performance Management (13th), Reporting (8th), Data Visualization (7th)
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
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
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
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

"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."
"We are able to generate quality reports easily which allows us to decrease response time."
"It is a stable product."
"The solution's initial setup process is easy."
"Self-service is possible through the use of dashboards, which are also very intuitive. Stories can be used to pin snapshots, tell the story for meetings, etc."
"A drag-and-drop interface for selecting creating ad hoc reports makes this product very easy to use."
"For planning, forecasting, in-boxing, modeling in general and for predicting numbers and doing work analysis, they are excellent."
"This solution allows you to input a wide range of file formats."
"The fact that you can add any data source is valuable. The entire data handling suite they have, all the apps, etc., is pretty amazing. One of the key things, not being a techie or a data-warehouse guy, is that you can connect data sources, and do all kinds of pretty amazing things."
"Domo has a lot of connections using APIs where you can use data from different databases, such as NoSQLs, SQL databases, and other connections. These connections exist to obtain data and transform whatever that you want."
"With ETL transformations in SQL lists, you often write a lot of queries. You have to build a bunch of code for the data. With Domo, one of the pieces we have is Magic ETL. In Magic ETL, you don't need to write code. You don't need to be a specialist in SQL or any database query language."
"This solution allows us to change our performance metrics and tracks our goals in real-time."
"The ease of use, overall, is one of the valuable features, as is the ease of setup. Other than making sure IT was aware of, and agreed with our proceeding, we did not need IT for any of the setup. The ease of setup is more valuable than you might think. The ease of configuring the security policies, setting up groups, and setting up personalized data permissions so that only certain people can see certain data — that stuff is amazing... Domo really is extraordinarily full-featured, but it's really easy to use."
"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."
"It has the best GUI. And it already has an ETL tool embedded in it..."
"The user interface is quite good."
"With Looker, I have experienced benefits in terms of usability and shareability."
"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."
"It's quite effortless to navigate through various applications and review their updated data in real-time."
"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."
"I would rate the stability a ten out of ten. I didn't face any issues with stability."
"From a developer's perspective, the way the functionality's being handled is great."
"We can centralize all our data models."
 

Cons

"It is a costly product; it is comparatively expensive."
"It would be nice to offer free online training on the tool for end-users."
"They should provide improved visual reporting."
"Extending dynamic cubes aggregate awareness with calculated measures."
"The visualization aspect needs to be improved and I believe, this is being resolved in upcoming versions."
"The charts and graphics are weak."
"Data modeling needs to be improved. We use the ETL process, and when we get errors, we then need to identify which structural change is required. The error messaging should be better. They should be descriptive rather than semantic."
"There are many problems with the product's stability part, making it an area where improvements are required."
"The ETL way of storing is not up to mark. You have to rely on the naming convention that you're using in Domo because there are no folder systems where you can collate all your workflows and put them into separate folders. A folder system should be there so you can easily identify how you are working. Once you want to make some changes to your ETL, then you can see the whole lineage, identifying what is there and not there."
"The forecasting feature, the regression features, and the Python libraries could all be improved. They're all in beta."
"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."
"In Tableau, you can create virtually any kind of visualization. Based on your creativity, you can create a visualization on a human body structure, you can create a visualization on anything that you want. But Domo is limited to a few kinds of visualization views: standard things like bar, pie, and some other charts... I would like to see them add new views for presenting the data in the visualization space."
"If Domo had a Copilot feature, you could interact with the graphs and talk to the graphs and tables."
"In terms of the analytics, there is quite a limited set of options when using Domo. Whereas with Tableau we can perform heavy statistical computations, Domo doesn't have that capability. Domo is quite limited on that side."
"If your ETL runs more than 24 hours, it always fails because we are logging a lot of historical data, and there is a restriction on the amount of data (in rows) that you can run. The technical support has not found a solution for this yet."
"I would like to see more dashboard creation options."
"Integrations with other BI tools could be better."
"The visualization capability of the product is limited."
"It needs to be more user-friendly."
"The integration with different databases must be improved."
"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."
"Stability needs improvement."
"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

"It is pretty expensive."
"I don't know the exact cost, but I believe Cognos is quite expensive, especially when it comes to the support consultants and the procedures that need to be applied."
"IBM Cognos is priced reasonable. However, it is more expensive than Power BI and Tableau."
"There is a standard license required to use this solution. There are some additional tools but I am not sure if they are an extra cost."
"It is my understanding that the cost is very low. It's not very expensive."
"The cost of IBM Cognos it's more or less the same as most of the other solutions on the market. They're very competitive with the rest of the market and it is not the most expensive product."
"IBM Cognos price is on the higher side of the spectrum. However, with the features that it brings, such as correlation analysis, it's worth the money. They should look at the pricing more clearly because it's a little on the higher side."
"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."
"For about 100 users our cost is $95,800."
"No matter if you're a developer or an end-user, the licensing cost is around $12 per user per month."
"I believe that the investment in Domo was worthwhile because it allowed for the organization to jump in quickly, with little training. There are different plans available based on the requirements."
"I think it is reasonable."
"The pricing differs from customer to customer, depending on the package."
"Because it's software as a service, it's more expensive on the face of it. But there are a lot of variables. I don't have to pay for servers or for infrastructure. I don't have to pay labor for my IT organization to set up or maintain the environment. I don't have to pay for them to upgrade the software, and test it, etc., because when it rolls out, it is transparent and seamless for us. But, because of that, it costs more, I imagine, than Sisense, or Yellowfin, or Power BI. A lot of those make it sound like they're inexpensive, but when you add in all the hidden costs and all of the overhead, it's probably comparable."
"We are making money from Domo, and all our clients are happy with the information that they receive from it."
"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."
"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."
"It's not cheap, but it's not expensive for big companies."
"Looker is expensive and could be made better by reducing it."
"It is cheap."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Educational Organization
56%
Financial Services Firm
7%
Computer Software Company
5%
Government
4%
Computer Software Company
12%
University
10%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Retailer
8%
Educational Organization
36%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Computer Software Company
9%
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 needs improvement with Domo?
Dashboard settings in Domo are not much different from other platforms like Power BI. Data integration is okay, but n...
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: November 2024.
817,354 professionals have used our research since 2012.