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Birst vs Looker comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jun 29, 2025

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

Birst
Ranking in Embedded BI
18th
Average Rating
7.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
20
Ranking in other categories
Reporting (30th)
Looker
Ranking in Embedded BI
9th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
19
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of January 2026, in the Embedded BI category, the mindshare of Birst is 1.2%, up from 0.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Looker is 6.4%, down from 9.0% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Embedded BI Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Looker6.4%
Birst1.2%
Other92.4%
Embedded BI
 

Featured Reviews

SK
Principal Engineering Manager I at a computer software company with 201-500 employees
Offers dashboards and self-service reports. The report performance is very slow.
Dashboards and self-service reports. These are widely used by customers in the EPM domain Most of our customers are interested in dashboards and self-service reports. We are able to offer them these features with this solution. Customer support takes lot of time to get a solution The report…
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

"Dashboards and self-service reports. These are widely used by customers in the EPM domain."
"From a developer's perspective, the way the functionality's being handled is great."
"I would rate the stability a ten out of ten. I didn't face any issues with stability."
"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."
"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."
"We can centralize all our data models."
"It's quite effortless to navigate through various applications and review their updated data in real-time."
"The stability of Looker has been good since I have been using it. However, it depends on what components are being used."
 

Cons

"Customer support takes lot of time to get a solution."
"The visualization capability of the product is limited."
"It needs to be more user-friendly."
"Integrations with other BI tools could be better."
"The integration with different databases must be improved."
"Stability needs improvement."
"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."
"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 product does not have documented material."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Please negotiate on the price and purchase the latest version."
"It's not cheap, but it's not expensive for big companies."
"I do not have to make any payments to use the solution."
"Looker is expensive and could be made better by reducing it."
"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 is cheap."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
No data available
Financial Services Firm
14%
Computer Software Company
8%
Retailer
8%
Media Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business3
Midsize Enterprise7
Large Enterprise12
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business5
Midsize Enterprise8
Large Enterprise6
 

Comparisons

 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Citrix Systems, Jive Software, SunnyD, Toshiba Medical Systems, Cisco OpenDNS, RB, Sunny D, Vertafore
Yahoo!, Etsy, Kohler, Hipcamp, Hubspot, Kickstarter, Venmo, Dollar Shave Club, 600+ customer
Find out what your peers are saying about Birst vs. Looker and other solutions. Updated: December 2025.
881,082 professionals have used our research since 2012.