We performed a comparison between Looker and Tableau 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.
"I would rate the stability a ten out of ten. I didn't face any issues with stability."
"It is a pretty stable solution because it is a cloud-based product."
"The product is easy to use."
"The stability of Looker has been good since I have been using it. However, it depends on what components are being used."
"We can centralize all our data 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."
"From a developer's perspective, the way the functionality's being handled is great."
"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."
"Tableau has data relationships that can be applied to a data source which helps build out a directory which is helpful. Data blending has also been valuable to us."
"The most valuable feature is the richness of its visualization and from a self-service standpoint, the ease of use."
"The data blending capabilities is a huge factor for our team."
"The solution is easy to use, flexible, our clients enjoy seeing the data on maps, and you do not need to be an expert in SQL to use it."
"The most valuable part of the solution is the general dashboard features."
"There is a lot of APIs available, which means that Tableau can be customized to a large extent."
"Tableau is highly scalable. Now that they've introduced Hyper, you can create an extract of more than 5 million rows in minutes and then do your analysis."
"The visualization capability of the product is limited."
"It needs to be more user-friendly."
"The product does not have documented material."
"The integration with different databases must be improved."
"Integrations with other BI tools could be better."
"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."
"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."
"Most of the problems in Tableau Online that I have noticed have to do with performance or weird, inexplicable bugs that I can't pin down. For example, you might try unloading some data, and you'll be waiting for a long time without anything happening."
"With Tableau, when you're dealing with very large datasets, it can be slow so the performance is an area that can be improved."
"I also work as an SME on the platform side. Tableau is very nice and jazzy for the end-users, but there are pain points for the admins. Performance is something about which we hear a lot of complaints, such as the dashboard doesn't open in time. It performs well on the desktop but not on the server. I know that there is always a limitation when it comes to a huge amount of data or the complexity of the calculations, but we often hear from end-users about the performance on the server side. It is easy to drag and drop all the columns and do what we want, but if it is not going to load better on the server, users are not going to like it."
"It is not so great when it comes to data exchange/integration, data mining, etc."
"Improvements in schema security and row/column security need to be made."
"The solution could use more features in data analytics."
"I would like to be able to set the parameters in a more specific manner."
"The tool's OpenAI integration was announced last year. However, it is late. Tableau is a good solution for end customers. However, there are some concerns regarding the stability and performance of its server architecture, including SaaS services. The server side appears unstable, and performance issues are noticeable, often accompanied by unclear error messages."
Looker is ranked 5th in Embedded BI with 19 reviews while Tableau is ranked 1st in Embedded BI with 290 reviews. Looker is rated 8.0, while Tableau is rated 8.4. The top reviewer of Looker writes "The APIs are exposed at every level, so it's highly modular". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Tableau writes "Provides fast data access with in-memory extracts, makes it easy to create visualizations, and saves time". Looker is most compared with Amazon QuickSight, Google Data Studio, Databricks, Qlik Sense and SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform, whereas Tableau is most compared with Microsoft Power BI, Amazon QuickSight, Domo, SAS Visual Analytics and Apache Superset. See our Looker vs. Tableau report.
See our list of best Embedded BI vendors.
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.
