Looker vs Microsoft Power BI comparison

The compared Google and Microsoft solutions aren't in the same category. Google is ranked #10 in EBT , and holds a 6.4% mindshare in the category. Microsoft is ranked #1 in BIT , with an average rating of 8.1, and holds a 9.3% mindshare. Additionally, 80% of Google users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 93% of Microsoft users who would recommend it.

Looker

Read 19 Looker reviews

2,532 Views
1,013 Comparison Views

80% willing to recommend

Microsoft Power BI

Read 329 Microsoft Power BI reviews

24,257 Views
15,524 Comparison Views

93% willing to recommend

Looker

Microsoft Power BI

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Download the report

Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between Looker and Microsoft Power BI based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out what your peers are saying about Salesforce, Qlik, MicroStrategy and others in Embedded BI.

To learn more, read our detailed Embedded BI Report (Updated: March 2026).

Buyer's Guide

Embedded BI

March 2026

Download the complete report

Helped 885,264 peers since 2012

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

Looker

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

7.0

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Embedded BI (10th)

Microsoft Power BI

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

6.7

Number of Reviews

329

Ranking in other categories

BI (Business Intelligence) Tools (1st), Reporting (1st)

Mindshare comparison

While both are Business Intelligence solutions, they serve different purposes. Looker is designed for Embedded BI and holds a mindshare of 6.4%, down 9.0% compared to last year.
Microsoft Power BI, on the other hand, focuses on BI (Business Intelligence) Tools, holds 9.3% mindshare, down 21.8% since last year.

Embedded BI Mindshare Distribution
Product	Mindshare (%)
Looker	6.4%
Tableau Enterprise	17.6%
Qlik Sense	8.6%
Other	67.4%

Embedded BI

BI (Business Intelligence) Tools Mindshare Distribution
Product	Mindshare (%)
Microsoft Power BI	9.3%
Tableau Enterprise	6.7%
Amazon QuickSight	3.7%
Other	80.3%

BI (Business Intelligence) Tools

Featured Reviews

Kishore Jhunjhunwala

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.

Read full review

Antonio Flor

Lead Anaplanner at Chaucer Group

Data integration has improved reserving and expense control while collaboration drives fast dashboards

Regarding drawbacks or weak points in Microsoft Power BI, it may not be directly related to the tool itself, but with our architecture, as we couldn't get a service account, which is an email address that has no relationship with the employees, just to establish the connection with Anaplan. We couldn't get it to work on SSO, so we use an employee account which could be a point of weakness, meaning if the person leaves, that connection will break. If the person goes on holiday and we need to refresh, we have to change the connection as well, but we have to live with that since we're not using SSO on the service account. Regarding the natural language processing feature, we're trying to avoid using it too much because it can slow down the connection, so as much as possible, we try to build the logic and any transformation in Anaplan, and then deliver an end product to Microsoft Power BI.

Read full review

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"It's quite effortless to navigate through various applications and review their updated data in real-time."

"We can centralize all our data models."

"In the past, adding a new dashboard to our product was a multi-week development effort, now our nontechnical product management and client success teams can create, launch, and maintain high quality dashboards with no interruption to the development team."

"It is easier and quicker to find things in the database."

"We LOVE Looker here at Snagajob."

"Looker is an extremely valuable product that can really transform your company's ability to use data to answer challenging questions."

"From a developer's perspective, the way the functionality's being handled is great."

"Technical support is the best ever."

More Looker pros

"Microsoft BI's dashboards are helpful."

"Power BI allows me to show detailed improvements in quality and safety and patient experience."

"The product is scalable."

"I get the information I need easily, and it's easy to read."

"Overall, this is a good tool and I recommend it."

"If you are not very technical this tool could be very useful."

"The ROI is high for small teams or basic use cases with limited datasets."

"The drill-down capabilities and automatic charts are the best ones, and the visualization is also very good; in terms of visualization, no competing product, such as IBM Cognos or any other product, has the same capabilities."

More Microsoft Power BI pros

Cons

"Features related to visualization should continue to be improved."

"Looker depends on the database components. For example, if you have a underperforming database, then you likely will have a poor performance experience."

"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."

"Some of the visualizations are a bit limited on how much you can customize them."

"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."

"Their needs to be much more control of visualizations to become more on par with Tableau."

"There is a lot of customization that we needed/need to build ourselves. Other BI tools have more out of the box."

More Looker cons

"The default parameters of the prompt could be improved by including a dynamic option."

"I would like to see more visualization options."

"I have been doing trial and error to figuring out how to do the data analyzing and modeling. There could be some improvement to simplify it."

"While support is okay, they need to improve it a lot."

"The SQL Server Reporting Services can certainly use some more help."

"The solution could be more customizable and you do not have too much freedom on the code."

"It's not really complicated, but I didn't find the things I was looking for. The ones I used to work with within Dash are more open, and there are more choices. But with Power BI, there are only limited types of plots that I can use. For example, when I wanted to put the plots in Power BI, there was no extendable space. You have a limited page where you can place a maximum of three plots in that, and you can't do more than that on a single page. You have to create a new page, a different page for that. That made it a bit annoying, and the filtering part is limited, with basic functions. If you want to make custom filtering or custom functions, you can't do that."

"Needs single sign-on."

More Microsoft Power BI cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Looker is expensive and could be made better by reducing it."

"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 is cheap."

"I do not have to make any payments to use the solution."

"Its pricing is great."

"The solution is priced well for what they offer. However, the premium version is very expensive."

"Pricing, that's where Microsoft beats Tableau. It is priced much cheaper."

"Its pricing is reasonable for the desktop stuff, but for enterprise-level, it is a little expensive."

"Power BI is subscription-based, and you have three options. The Pro edition, which is the standard one, is about $9 per user. The Premium edition, which provides AI and cloud capabilities but at a limited size, is for small to medium enterprises. It is about $20 per user. For large enterprises, such as manufacturing facilities, there is an option for the capacity. The capacity subscription is about $4,000 per capacity level. They also have an option for the on-premises version, but it is not common to see someone going for the on-premises version. The on-premises version requires a specific license that is attached to SQL Server. I believe it is about $17,000, but I'm not sure about it."

"No comment."

"Setup is easy, and the cost is economical. You do sometimes need to pay additional costs for third party products which "plug-in" to Microsoft BI."

"Microsoft BI is not very cheap. A premium license costs roughly 5,000 euros a month."

More Microsoft Power BI pricing and cost advice

See which vendors are best for you

Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Embedded BI solutions are best for your needs.

See recommendations

885,264 professionals have used our research since 2012.

Comparison Review

it_user79932

Senior Manager - BI Head with 5,001-10,000 employees

Feb 4, 2015

Comparison of SAP BO, Tableau, QlikView, Cognos, Microsoft, OBIEE and Pentaho

1. SAP BO/BI Enterprise scalability Security Ease of use Semantic layer 2. Tableau Visualization Data discovery Turnaround time 3. IBM Cognos Enterprise scalability Security In-memory feature 4. MS BI - Flexibility 5. Pentaho - Open source but still enterprise grade 6. QlikView Data…

Read full review

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

13%

Retailer

Computer Software Company

Media Company

Financial Services Firm

11%

Manufacturing Company

Government

Computer Software Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	5
Midsize Enterprise	8
Large Enterprise	6

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	135
Midsize Enterprise	58
Large Enterprise	166

Questions from the Community

Ask a question

Earn 20 points

Seeking lightweight open source BI software

There are many...It would rather depend what System BI architecture or Enterprise legacy you have at your end...I would recommend as follows: 1) If you have legacies of SAP, Oracle - look for SAP...

See all answers

Is Power BI a complete platform or only a visualization tool?

Power BI is an advanced visualization tool oriented to big data with a very complete set of widgets to visualize information, control users accessing information, the configuration of governance po...

See all answers

How does Oracle OBIEE compare with Microsoft BI?

Oracle OBIEE is great in allowing design and creativity per the individual needs of the organization. Dashboards are fully customizable and very user-friendly. This solution is very stable. Oracle ...

See all answers

Comparisons

Tableau Enterprise vs Looker

Compared 13% of the time

Databricks vs Looker

Compared 8% of the time

MicroStrategy vs Looker

Compared 8% of the time

ThoughtSpot vs Looker

Compared 7% of the time

Qlik Sense vs Looker

Compared 6% of the time

More Looker Competitors

Amazon QuickSight vs Microsoft Power BI

Compared 16% of the time

Tableau Enterprise vs Microsoft Power BI

Compared 14% of the time

Domo vs Microsoft Power BI

Compared 7% of the time

Databricks vs Microsoft Power BI

Compared 2% of the time

SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform vs Microsoft Power BI

Compared 2% of the time

More Microsoft Power BI Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Looker

March 2026

Download Looker product report

Buyer's Guide

Microsoft Power BI

March 2026

Download Microsoft Power BI product report

Also Known As

No data available

SSRS, SSAS, MSBI, MS Reporting Services, Microsoft BI Tools, Microsoft Big Data, Power BI Pro, MS BI

Overview

Looker is a powerful data analytics platform that empowers businesses to explore and analyze their data in real time.

With its intuitive interface and robust features, Looker enables users to easily create and share interactive dashboards, reports, and visualizations.

The product's advanced data modeling capabilities and seamless integration with popular data sources make it a top choice for organizations looking to gain valuable insights from their data.

Google

Microsoft Power BI is a powerful tool for data analysis and visualization. This tool stands out for its ability to merge and analyze data from various sources. Widely adopted across different industries and departments, Power BI is instrumental in creating visually appealing dashboards and generating insightful business intelligence reports. Its intuitive interface, robust visualization capabilities, and seamless integration with other Microsoft applications empower users to easily create interactive reports and gain valuable insights.

Microsoft

Sample Customers

Yahoo!, Etsy, Kohler, Hipcamp, Hubspot, Kickstarter, Venmo, Dollar Shave Club, 600+ customer

Accenture Adidas Aetna AIG Airbus Alibaba Allstate Amazon American Express Aon AT&T Audi Bank of America BASF Bayer Berkshire Hathaway Boeing Coca-Cola Comcast Cisco Coca-Cola Dell Disney Emirates Equinix FedEx Ford GE Google H&M Home Depot Honda IBM Intel JPMorgan Chase Kellogg's Kroger L'Oréal McDonald's Merck MetLife Microsoft Nike Oracle P&G PepsiCo Procter & Gamble Prudential Financial SAP Siemens Snapchat Spotify Starbucks Target Toyota T-Mobile Unilever Visa Walmart WeWork World Bank Xerox

Find out what your peers are saying about Salesforce, Qlik, MicroStrategy and others in Embedded BI. Updated: March 2026.

DOWNLOAD NOW

885,264 professionals have used our research since 2012.

We monitor all Embedded BI 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.