Looker vs MicroStrategy comparison

Read 160 MicroStrategy reviews

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Looker

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Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between Looker and MicroStrategy based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out in this report how the two Embedded BI solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI.

To learn more, read our detailed Looker vs. MicroStrategy Report (Updated: April 2025).

Looker vs. MicroStrategy

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Helped 849,686 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

Ranking in Embedded BI

5th

Average Rating

8.0

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

MicroStrategy

Ranking in Embedded BI

4th

Average Rating

8.2

Reviews Sentiment

6.7

Number of Reviews

160

Ranking in other categories

BI (Business Intelligence) Tools (9th)

Mindshare comparison

As of May 2025, in the Embedded BI category, the mindshare of Looker is 9.4%, down from 11.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of MicroStrategy is 11.6%, up from 10.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Embedded BI

Featured Reviews

Kishore Jhunjhunwala

Sr Analytics Consultant at a tech vendor 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.

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AJIN S L

Technical Analyst at Allianz

Experience has shown effective features for analysis, but needs interface improvements

The most effective features of MicroStrategy for data analysis are those that cater to user needs. However, I find Power BI to be more useful when comparing some features, but my company does not choose Power BI due to certain code restrictions. The MicroStrategy interface is not as good as Power BI, especially concerning the user-friendly aspects.

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Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"With Looker, I have experienced benefits in terms of usability and shareability."

"The product is easy to use."

"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."

"The stability of Looker has been good since I have been using it. However, it depends on what components are being used."

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

"I would rate the stability a ten out of ten. I didn't face any issues with stability."

"We can centralize all our data models."

More Looker pros

"Semi-automatic support of implementing date dimensions, including delta to prior year implementation."

"It's a stand-alone mobile development app that you don't even have to do business intelligence on. You can just use it to build apps."

"We've made a few enhancements to our Enterprise Manager system to allow self-reporting to grow. We see that as a very useful system. It's been incredibly beneficial in diagnosing production performance issues, diagnosing what reports are running slowly, where the SQL could be optimized, opportunities or metrics where we see long-time running performance. Enterprise Manager has been absolutely vital in giving us some of the insights about our system."

"With all the APIs it's very scalable."

"I really like the visualizations. I like how you can put large data sets in there, then the user can quickly go through the data and drill down at various levels to understand things."

"We pretty much use the knowledge base. We feel that Microstrategy's community is a good forum to use."

"The most valuable feature is the ability to build reports, then customize for different groups instead of having to build multiple reports. Therefore, the ability to build customization in the reports for different groups."

"We have been using it mostly for grid reports and its exporting features."

More MicroStrategy pros

Cons

"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."

"The visualization capability of the product is limited."

"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."

"Integrations with other BI tools could be better."

"The product does not have documented material."

"It needs to be more user-friendly."

"MicroStrategy is not cloud native today and some of their APIs are a little limiting."

"The implementation itself was pretty straightforward. The tricky part was understanding MicroStrategy's licensing model, which was a bit convoluted back then."

"If you do not learn the ins or outs, it can be a difficult tool to use. You could do a PoC and get enough out of it to be able to use it. However, when it comes to administering it, you definitely need the training."

"They need to improve the web."

"Training would be an area that they could improve upon."

"They should provide more tutorials and include some project files."

"Getting our data to work with the tool is where we are having issues."

"One of the things that I want to see MicroStrategy do is become more cloud native. Right now, the deployment on cloud is very easy to ruin, it is very much like spinning up separate VMs."

More MicroStrategy cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

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

"It is cheap."

"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."

"It's not cheap, but it's not expensive for big companies."

"They made a change in the licensing module some time ago and we can now use all the enterprise tools for free."

"We have a license with packages, and there are additional costs for extra components."

"There have been actual direct bottomline impacts in terms of extra revenue created from the reporting solutions."

"While initial cost of MicroStrategy is still on the higher side, the long-term benefits brings down overall cost of ownership significantly as compared to other tools like Tableau/Cognos."

"We actually researched some of the other solutions. For options, price, and customer acceptance, this product has worked well for us."

"MicroStrategy's licensing cost is higher than that of other tools in the market. My company uses the enterprise edition of the product."

"They can improve its licensing. It is a bit expensive as compared to Microsoft and other tools."

"They gave us a good deal."

More MicroStrategy pricing and cost advice

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Comparison Review

it_user6330

Product Manager at a retailer with 10,001+ employees

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…

Read full review

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Educational Organization

30%

Computer Software Company

11%

Financial Services Firm

11%

Manufacturing Company

Financial Services Firm

17%

Computer Software Company

12%

Retailer

Insurance Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

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, ...

What do you like most about MicroStrategy?

The stability of the product is good.

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for MicroStrategy?

For larger businesses, I think the pricing is logical, but for smaller companies, it can be a bit costly.

What needs improvement with MicroStrategy?

MicroStrategy could learn from Power BI's user-friendly interface. I find the user interface lacking when compared to Power BI. Additionally, their hyperintelligence could be improved in certain as...

Amazon QuickSight vs Looker

Comparisons

Databricks vs Looker

Compared 18% of the time

Tableau vs Looker

Compared 13% of the time

Compared 12% of the time

Microsoft Power BI vs Looker

Compared 10% of the time

QlikView vs Looker

Compared 3% of the time

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Tableau vs MicroStrategy

Compared 18% of the time

Microsoft Power BI vs MicroStrategy

Compared 16% of the time

Amazon QuickSight vs MicroStrategy

Compared 10% of the time

IBM Cognos vs MicroStrategy

Compared 8% of the time

SAP Crystal Reports vs MicroStrategy

Compared 3% of the time

More MicroStrategy Competitors

Product Reports

Looker

Download Looker product report

Download MicroStrategy product report

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

Company: Founded in 1989, MicroStrategy (Nasdaq: MSTR) is a leading worldwide provider of enterprise software platforms. With direct operations in 26 countries worldwide and approximately 2,000 employees, our mission is to provide enterprise analytics, mobility, and security platforms that are flexible, powerful, scalable and user-friendly. To learn more, visit MicroStrategy online, and follow us on Facebook and Twitter.

Product portfoilio:

MicroStrategy 10 Secure Enterprise™ empowers leading organizations to analyze vast amounts of data and distribute actionable business insight throughout an enterprise through two distinct offerings: MicroStrategy Analytics™ and MicroStrategy Desktop™. MicroStrategy Analytics delivers reports and dashboards, and enables users to conduct ad hoc analysis and share insights anywhere, anytime, via mobile devices or the Web. It also combines the agility and productivity of self-service visual data discovery with the security, scalability, and governance features of enterprise-grade business intelligence. MicroStrategy Desktop is a standalone, on-premise visual data discovery tool designed to enable business users to analyze and understand their data. MicroStrategy Mobile™ enables organizations to rapidly build custom business applications that deliver analytics combined with transactions, multimedia, and custom workflows to mobile devices. MicroStrategy Secure Cloud™ combines all of the enterprise analytics, mobile, and security features in MicroStrategy 10 Secure Enterprise with powerful and scalable data integration, validation, and warehousing services — all delivered in an environment where organizations can deploy transformational analytics applications in minutes.

Usher, MicroStrategy’s breakthrough security solution, is a powerful mobile security platform designed to dematerialize traditional forms of identity verification (such as passwords, tokens, and physical badges) and replace them with a single mobile identity badge that is cryptographically linked to its owner’s smartphone and dynamically linked to an enterprise’s existing identity repositories. Usher works on standard Android and iOS smartphones, and also boasts an Apple Watch™ integration.

Sample Customers

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

Allstate Insurance, Barneys New York, Boston Children's Hospital, Buenos Aires Department of the Treasury, Campbell Soup Company, DHL, eBay, eHarmony, Facebook, Four Seasons Hotels Inc., Godiva, Hard Rock International, LinkedIn, Netflix, Pfizer, SECO (Swiss Government Unemployment Agency), Starbucks, Texas A&M University, Thomson Reuters Markets, US House of Representatives, and the US Postal Service.

Looker vs. MicroStrategy