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Dundas BI 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

Dundas BI
Ranking in Embedded BI
11th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
21
Ranking in other categories
Data Visualization (25th)
Looker
Ranking in Embedded BI
5th
Average Rating
8.0
Number of Reviews
19
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2025, in the Embedded BI category, the mindshare of Dundas BI is 1.0%, down from 1.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Looker is 9.3%, down from 11.9% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Embedded BI
 

Featured Reviews

Ishwar Saswade - PeerSpot reviewer
Has a lot of integration and visualization options, but can't be easily used by business users, and working with the color palette is difficult
With Dundas BI, we do not have end-users apart from the developers. End-users do not find it easy to create their own reports. Most of the implementations I have seen require a developer team for creating the visuals, and they then give them to end-users. A self-serve part where end-users or business users can create their own reports would help in terms of the adoption of Dundas BI. Currently, business users find it difficult to work with Dundas BI because there are so many settings that they don't know what they need to do. Even when a developer starts working on Dundas BI, he needs to spend at least one month or so getting used to the functionalities of Dundas BI. Even then, it is not easy to remember where or how they made a certain property change. It takes at least one month for a developer to get acquainted with it. Working with the color palette is difficult in Dundas BI. They can work on different color palettes and make them organized and user-friendly. It would help a long way. Most of the time, the users face challenges in assigning colors to the fields that they have created or to the dimensions and measures in a chart. Dundas can further reduce the number of settings they have. When you create any chart in Dundas, you get a lot of features to control each setting, which is pretty useful for BI, but for end-users, it is difficult to identify the exact settings to change a property. I would love it if some of the options come pre-selected. If some of the settings are set to best practices by default, it will be helpful. Whenever we have any issues, the error messages that we get in Dundas BI are not very helpful in identifying the root cause. Making these changes will bring a lot of change to the end-user experience.
Kishore Jhunjhunwala - PeerSpot reviewer
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 use Dundas to report on machine sensor data and create dashboards."
"With Dundas BI, you have a lot of visualization choices, and you can also do customizations by using HTML coding and JavaScript. The ease of development was one of the main factors for going for Dundas BI. The client had different reporting tools, but they wanted something that could accommodate all requirements."
"The Layers feature organizes my work and makes it easier, instead of having to use scripting to show and hide when drilling down."
"We have now the ability to create interactive and complex reports without the need for software developers and code."
"It was quite easy to use. The UI was basically drag-and-drop based. So, even if you were a beginner at coding software or something else, it would be easy to catch up on Dundas BI."
"The solution has a good drag-and-drop feature for creating dashboards."
"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."
"With Looker, I have experienced benefits in terms of usability and shareability."
"It is a pretty stable solution because it is a cloud-based product."
"I would rate the stability a ten out of ten. I didn't face any issues with stability."
"The stability of Looker has been good since I have been using it. However, it depends on what components are being used."
"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."
"The product is easy to use."
 

Cons

"Lacks sufficient online support."
"I would love to see more functions built in inside the application, instead of being scripted. They already did some of that in the new release, version 5, like forecasting, trend lines, etc., and I would love to see more of these kinds of calculations, which we used to do it by scripts before."
"It would be helpful if Dundas made the UI more user-friendly like the leading tools and decreased the learning curve. It should be simpler for a beginner to build dashboards."
"For every object, references are generated, but sometimes, there was a problem with the references overlapping each other. Everything would go off. It would stop working, and then from the admin side, people had to do something to bring it up again."
"I cannot select a visualization and see what filters are connected to it."
"Working with the color palette is difficult in Dundas BI. They can work on different color palettes and make them organized and user-friendly. It would help a long way. Most of the time, the users face challenges in assigning colors to the fields that they have created or to the dimensions and measures in a chart."
"Stability needs improvement."
"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."
"Integrations with other BI tools could be better."
"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."
"The product does not have documented material."
"It needs to be more user-friendly."
"The integration with different databases must be improved."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"I'm not aware of its cost. Its licensing was probably role-wise. Most of us had reader access, editor access, or developer access. For admin, there were certain restrictions. So, I'm assuming it had role-wise licensing."
"I am not majorly involved in its licensing. We are not the end license purchaser of the Dundas BI. It costs somewhere around $4,000 a year for the enterprise solution, but I am not sure."
"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."
"Looker is expensive and could be made better by reducing it."
"It's not cheap, but it's not expensive for big companies."
"It is cheap."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Government
17%
Computer Software Company
12%
University
9%
Educational Organization
9%
Educational Organization
32%
Computer Software Company
11%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Manufacturing Company
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

Ask a question
Earn 20 points
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 advanced users who have experience with BI tools use Looker, then they may find it t...
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, ...
 

Comparisons

 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Coca Cola, Siemens, Verizon, Microsoft, Pitney Bowes, Scotiabank, Pepperidge Farm, Shutterstock, Norwegian Government, Boeing, Guess Inc., BP, Bayer
Yahoo!, Etsy, Kohler, Hipcamp, Hubspot, Kickstarter, Venmo, Dollar Shave Club, 600+ customer
Find out what your peers are saying about Dundas BI vs. Looker and other solutions. Updated: January 2025.
846,617 professionals have used our research since 2012.