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Domo vs Looker vs Tableau 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:
 

Mindshare comparison

BI (Business Intelligence) Tools
Embedded BI
BI (Business Intelligence) Tools
 

Featured Reviews

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.
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.
Nattawat Choosuwan - PeerSpot reviewer
Real-time data connection enhances workflow and decision-making process
An area for improvement in Tableau is the Explorer license type. It is not as useful, and the product owner should enhance its benefits or clarify its role. Additionally, the frequent updates with many versions available for download can be confusing and could affect stability. They should avoid providing access to older versions on their website.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"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."
"We find the ease of using the solution valuable."
"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."
"Domo's real-time insights and customizable alerts are one of their better features."
"The dashboard is the most valuable feature and allows for customization to create and share reports."
"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."
"The user interface is quite good."
"The ability to create custom connectors was useful because you never know, with customers, what platform they want to utilize or what data they have. It gave us a lot of flexibility in being able to bring data in from different places."
"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."
"It is a pretty stable solution because it is a cloud-based product."
"We can centralize all our data models."
"I would rate the stability a ten out of ten. I didn't face any issues with stability."
"It's quite effortless to navigate through various applications and review their updated data in real-time."
"With Looker, I have experienced benefits in terms of usability and shareability."
"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."
"It's the ease of use. It is also a self-service tool so it decreases the burden on having centralized IT-type teams or developers."
"From the data science point of view, we use it for model building purposes. For example, if we are using it for a bank and we want to understand how much loan the bank can provide, we can use visualization to show the educational qualification, salary, gender, and city of a customer, and by using this information, we can arrive at the loan amount that this person is eligible for. I can also use it to view all prospective customers, so essentially, this is going to help me in model building as well as in understanding and segmenting customers and doing forecasting and predictive analytics. We use model widgets, and we can create thousands of visualizations, such as motion charts and bubble charts. We can also create animated versions of the graphs and view the data from multiple dimensions. These are the features that we typically use and like."
"When compared with Power BI, Tableau is much easier."
"Scheduled extract and the multiple connectors are fantastic!"
"It's very easy to set everything up."
"The solution allows for the possibility for end-users to do their own reporting."
"Tableau's ability to manage extensive data, even in an extract format, is noteworthy, as Power BI struggles with that."
"The ability to deploy is the added ability to centralise the Tableau repository for all Tableau Developers."
 

Cons

"One of the biggest problems is that end users require a license to run their own reports and dashboards, which are fairly expensive."
"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 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."
"It is expensive."
"The forecasting feature, the regression features, and the Python libraries could all be improved. They're all in beta."
"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."
"I would also like to see improvements to their drag and drop Magic ETL tool. You can drag and drop your ETL tool, but it doesn't really work for a large amount of data. It struggles with that. In a real-world application, where you're working with 30 million rows or 100 million rows, it takes a bit longer to process the data. If you do it in the Redshift ETL tool, using your own code, it's much faster."
"It needs to be more user-friendly."
"The product does not have documented material."
"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."
"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 integration with different databases must be improved."
"The visualization capability of the product is limited."
"Stability needs improvement."
"I am not a frequent user of this solution, so I am not sure what they've been doing recently. The last time when I used it, I had to use other tools with it for data extraction and cleansing. Its price should also be improved. It is more expensive than Power BI. In terms of training, there is generally better online training for Power BI, but I am not sure of that. It would be helpful to know from where to access its training."
"Creating empty extracts is not easy."
"It would be nice if we could export more raw data. Currently, there is a limit as to how much data you can export."
"With Tableau, when you're dealing with very large datasets, it can be slow so the performance is an area that can be improved."
"If you wanted to create something without making it an extra column in the data set, you can't just rename it to a more user-friendly short name."
"The Hyper Extract functionality is not as strong as that provided by Microsoft SQL."
"With performance tuning, it generates a pretty complex query when it is not required."
"The ability to use it on MAC machines. As far as I know, this is not possible."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."
"Domo is slightly costly but it's much cheaper than some."
"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."
"It is on the pricier end."
"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."
"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."
"They've built an "app economy." Some of them are really expensive, so they're not for startups and smaller companies. They're more like enterprise tools. We couldn't afford some of them, because they were so crazy expensive. But if I was working for a bank, insurance company, or some bigger corporation then, for sure, you could justify those prices... It was silly expensive back then and it probably still is, or even more expensive."
"It is cheap."
"Looker is expensive and could be made better by reducing it."
"I do not have to make any payments to use the solution."
"It's not cheap, but it's not expensive for big companies."
"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 an annual fee with everything included but it's quite expensive."
"There is a license for the use of this solution and it is on a per-user basis. The server is free but the users you have to pay for."
"If they want to be competitive in the market, the price must be improved."
"Tableau is a little cheaper as compared to Power BI and other technologies that we have used in the past. However, if the business users in our organization want to make presentations, Tableau has been asking us to purchase a Tableau Creator license, and $35 per month is expensive for business users. Power BI is giving a free desktop version for business users to connect to any data source and build their own dashboards. That's why we have proposed to use Power BI for most of the business users in our organization."
"We pay for the enterprise license for Tableau. The licensing could be cheaper and more flexible."
"I believe it has a lifelong license, and once you purchase it, you don't have to renew it, but I'm not sure."
"Tableau's prices are relatively high for our market. I am from Serbia, so many companies in this market don't have the ability to pay for expensive software. My clients are quite satisfied with a lot of Tableau's qualities except for the prices."
"The value for money is definitely there."
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Comparison Review

it_user6330 - PeerSpot reviewer
May 2, 2013
MicroStrategy vs. Tableau
After a recent presentation, several attendees asked me about the applications of Visual Insights and Tableau. Many companies are investing in both tools and are trying to figure out the right tool for specific applications Tableau has found its sweet-spot as an agile discovery tool that analysts…
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
12%
University
11%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Financial Services Firm
7%
Financial Services Firm
14%
Computer Software Company
14%
Retailer
6%
Healthcare Company
6%
Financial Services Firm
16%
Computer Software Company
10%
Manufacturing Company
10%
University
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

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?
Domo is the premium option of all the choices. It has fancy features including a built-in chat program with the Buzz ...
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...
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 ...
Tableau vs. Business Objects - Which is a better solution for visualization and analysis?
Both tools have their positives and negatives. First, I should mention that I am relatively new to Tableau. I have be...
Which would you choose - Tableau or SAP Analytics Cloud?
Tableau is easy to set up and maintain. In about a day it is possible for the entire platform to be deployed for use....
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

corda
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Tableau Desktop, Tableau Server, Tableau Online
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

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
Accenture, Adobe, Amazon.com, Bank of America, Charles Schwab Corp, Citigroup, Coca-Cola Company, Cornell University, Dell, Deloitte, Duke University, eBay, Exxon Mobil, Fannie Mae, Ferrari, French Red Cross, Goldman Sachs, Google, Government of Canada, HP, Intel, Johns Hopkins Hospital, Macy's, Merck, The New York Times, PayPal, Pfizer, US Army, US Air Force, Skype, and Walmart.
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