We performed a comparison between Databricks and Looker based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out what your peers are saying about Databricks, Microsoft, Alteryx and others in Data Science Platforms."The processing capacity is tremendous in the database."
"Databricks has a scalable Spark cluster creation process. The creators of Databricks are also the creators of Spark, and they are the industry leaders in terms of performance."
"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."
"Databricks has helped us have a good presence in data."
"I haven't heard about any major stability issues. At this time I feel like it's stable."
"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."
"It's easy to increase performance as required."
"Databricks gives you the flexibility of using several programming languages independently or in combination to build models."
"With Looker, I have experienced benefits in terms of usability and shareability."
"It's quite effortless to navigate through various applications and review their updated data in real-time."
"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 product is easy to use."
"From a developer's perspective, the way the functionality's being handled is great."
"The stability of Looker has been good since I have been using it. However, it depends on what components are being used."
"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 pricing of Databricks could be cheaper."
"There would also be benefits if more options were available for workers, or the clusters of the two points."
"The product should incorporate more learning aspects. It needs to have a free trial version that the team can practice."
"I would like more integration with SQL for using data in different workspaces."
"The stability of the clusters or the instances of Databricks would be better if it was a much more stable environment. We've had issues with crashes."
"I have had some issues with some of the Spark clusters running on Databricks, where the Spark runtime and clusters go up and down, which is an area for improvement."
"There should be better integration with other platforms."
"The data visualization for this solution could be improved. They have started to roll out a data visualization tool inside Databricks but it is in the early stages. It's not comparable to a solution like Power BI, Luca, or Tableau."
"Integrations with other BI tools could be better."
"The visualization capability of the product is limited."
"It needs to be more user-friendly."
"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."
"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 integration with different databases must be improved."
Databricks is ranked 1st in Data Science Platforms with 77 reviews while Looker is ranked 4th in Embedded BI with 19 reviews. Databricks is rated 8.2, while Looker is rated 8.0. The top reviewer of Databricks writes "A nice interface with good features for turning off clusters to save on computing". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Looker writes "The APIs are exposed at every level, so it's highly modular". Databricks is most compared with Amazon SageMaker, Informatica PowerCenter, Microsoft Azure Machine Learning Studio, Dataiku Data Science Studio and Azure Stream Analytics, whereas Looker is most compared with Amazon QuickSight, Tableau, Google Data Studio, Qlik Sense and SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform.
We monitor all Data Science Platforms reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.