Looker Reviews

I use Looker to deal mostly with simple visuals because it doesn't have much capability to clean data. I use Looker to manage simple visualization once I finish cleaning the data.

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

The most valuable feature of the solution is that it is a user-friendly tool that is easy to integrate. I can easily share Looker with somebody who has a Google email address. Those who don't have a Google email address can easily see what I have been working on since I can share it easily with them.

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, then it is a really big process, which contributes to the tool's limiting factors related to the area of pre-processing of data. The tool should offer more visualization capabilities and processing abilities.

I have been using Looker for a year.

It is a stable solution most of the time.

I have not used the solution's scalability part.

I have experience with Tableau and Power BI. With Looker, it is easy to sign up, and its onboarding process is straightforward. There is no need for me to download any app for Looker if I use it online, but for the other tools, most of the time, I have to download the app if I want to access more features or capabilities, and at times, I may have no idea about it. The spread of features and how much Looker offers is much less compared to what the other BI tools offer, which I feel are more advanced.

The product's initial setup phase was straightforward.

The product requires a PnP deployment. I already had a Google account, so I had to just sign up with my Google email address, and I was able to access the features of 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 to be a product with a few limitations.

I am a student who uses Looker for certain projects, but I use another solution at work. In short, I choose Looker for my personal use.

I do not need to do anything to keep the product up and running.

I rate the overall tool a six out of ten.

I have used the product with some clients. 

We use it to build a dashboard for the executives of the businesses. With it, we can create better insights for them and create visualizations for the businesses. The primary use of the dashboard which we developed is to track the progress on the sales and marketing side. Basically, it's used to give companies better insights. 

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

The solution is stable.

It's an easy product to set up.

The solution offers helpful community support.

They need to work more on interactivity in order to help users interact with the tool itself.

It needs to be more user-friendly. People should be able to access the tool in a much easier way when they are trying to develop something. Finding items is harder on Looker than it is on, for example, Tableau. 

Looker needs to provide a better user interface. 

Training should be freely available on platforms like YouTube. That way, people can go and learn the tool. Tableau and Power BI already provide a lot of free training and users can go and learn anything they need on their own. Looker is at a disadvantage when they don't have proper training easily available. 

I have not seen much penetration in the market in terms of marketing. They don't seem to be doing any marketing with the tool. 

They seem to be moving towards machine learning. However, they need to create a separate space for themselves in the market. 

We haven't used the solution for that long. 

The solution is quite stable. This is a late entry in the market compared to what Tableau or Power BI did in the market. It will take some time to really create that impression in people's minds about that tool. However, we haven't had issues with reliability.

The solution's scalability is good. Unlike Tableau, which becomes slow over time (when the data size increases), Looker has been decent.  

Here there's a team of four or five people only who use the solution. It's not a big team. You don't need a lot of people to build the visualization. I'm not sure if there are plans to increase usage. That would be a decision of management. 

I've not dealt directly with technical support. However, their community support is very helpful.

I'm aware of Power BI and Tableau.

If I compare Tableau, Power BI, and Looker and Looker has a little bit of a disadvantage over Tableau. Tableau, in terms of how things have been created, is better from a user perspective. It is a little costly, however, at the same time, the kind of interactivity, the kind of interaction it gives to the business, is useful. Power BI is a little cheaper compared to Tableau in terms of subscription. Power BI also is great for companies that have a lot of databases like Microsoft SQL Server or Microsoft Azure.

The initial setup was decent and not that complex. It was easy.

There's a deployment team here. I develop tool visualization and they take care of the deployment part. I don't directly deal with the setup process. I know that, with Tableau, it's just a few clicks and you are up and running. The same goes for Power BI.

We have an in-house team that deals with the implementation.

I have noted an ROI, however, a client would be more able to speak to which ways in particular.

I don't know their subscription fees. I am not really aware of where they stand in terms of pricing. However, it's my understanding that Tableau is more expensive. 

The pricing for Power BI and Tableau varies quite a bit. You pay maybe $1,000 for a user subscription for Tableau and $100 for Power BI.

I'm a consultant and I work with various tools. I basically work with whatever tool the client needs me to. 

I'd advise potential new users to train and get good training. Go with the basic steps first. They need to learn the tool decently. A lot of people know Tableau and Power BI, however, when it comes to Looker, they need to do proper training. Looker should also provide some very quick training for the new users, and they should provide some training to the business users as well, with videos to show how to navigate the tool, et cetera.

I'd rate the solution seven out of ten. If the GUI was better, I would rate it higher. 

We cannot disclose our use cases.

I did not, yet. Our organization first needs to be transformed.

Looker matched the requirements. Very professional sales tiger team.

For any tailoring, we would contact our sales reps.

I have used Looker within the last 12-36 months.

Again, the stability of Looker depends on what components are being used. 

The Looker solution itself did perform as expected in the test environment.

Looker can be scalable, but it depends on what components are being used. If the components are scalable and performant, then the solution can be highly scalable.

I have had a good experience with technical support. They are very good.

Positive

Our current (still in use) solution did not meet basic requirements.

We cannot disclose the cloud provider. The cloud provider offered extensive, professional support for everyone willing to deploy the solution.

Both options are available. The vendor team is the best option, though.

Multi-million

With respect to buy solutions, cost is relevant. 

However, the Looker solution would have outmatched the ongoing multi-million budget spending with respect to cost-efficiency.

Yes. We cannot disclose any competitors.

Looker depends on the database components.

For example, if you have a underperforming database, then you likely will have a poor performance experience.

LookML semantic middle layer: Gives me the ability to centralize and normalize all of the data for end users. This includes everything from names & definitions (which becomes our official data dictionary) to KPI calculations to custom datasets. Persisted Derived Tables (PDTS) are also a killer feature. This allows easy creation of custom datasets to expose to all end users.

No more backlog of simple data pull requests from most employees. Over 100 people are answering their own questions. Even PR loves being able to source their own data to build stories.

Their needs to be much more control of visualizations to become more on par with Tableau. We have to jump through a lot of hoops to do simple things like control what range is displayed on the X-axis of a trend chart. Also want more chart types: heat maps, for instance.

We have used this solution for one year.

Looker rolls out releases to customers in stages. When we were in the late stage bucket, we would get the release 2-3 weeks after it first launched and things were very stable. After we opted to be in the early stage, sometimes the product was unstable or buggy for 1-2 weeks after the release. Some bugs significantly hindered productivity, so we have switched back to being a late stage customer.

I would give technical support a rating of 9/10. They are very responsive and often installed patches within hours of reporting problems.

We previously used Omniture which was effective for click-stream analysis but limited in exposing other types of data, like product state data (I.e. how many users are currently subscribed to our newsletter?). We also considered Tableau, but it lacks a semantic/programmatic middle later and so is nowhere near as customizable. I wanted a tool that would be extremely flexible so I felt like we'd never be truly 'stuck' in what kind of dataset we could provide to end users without implanting large ETL projects.

The initial setup was simple. Looker helped us with best practices and we were up and running in a single day. Looker auto-generates all of the LookML required to expose tables, and the language makes it very easy to join tables and expose larger 'explores' (views) to end users. Love features that allow us to rename fields on the fly, add descriptions, and bucket fields into sections. Results in a very intuitive end user experience.

We implemented In-house. For Looker, get educated on data security features and best practices for organizing 'explores' into different 'models'. As with all data exploration tools, the performance is the biggest challenge. In Looker's case the performance bottleneck is not Looker, it's the database. So, have a strategy to optimize query performance. After that, setting up Looker's caching features is hugely beneficial. Most of our users just need daily data, so we globally cache all query results for 8 hours. That way if someone finds something interesting in the data and shares the link with 20 other people, those folks see instantaneous results when they click the link ( and no extra DB load). You can also set caching at more granular levels.

ROI is difficult to measure, but we are absolutely on the positive side mostly because of problems we've caught and corrected.

Several fixes saved us tens of thousands of dollars, and numerous product improvements have resulting in even more. Empowering every employee to make smarter decisions in less time easily pushes us into the black on ROI. Looker is competitively priced, and they are open to working with you on a fair price.

Looker can do anything SQL can do. If you are a SQL shop, you want to centralize data definitions, and you want programmable flexibility, then Looker is a wonderful choice.

For my company, the ability to embed professional dashboards directly into our multi-tenant SaaS was our top priority. "Powered by Looker" was the only product on the market that gave us this capability with row level access filtering out of the box.

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. The time from inception to delivery is the same day. The results are much more clean, interactive, and professional.

User and group management in conjunction with dashboard organization used to be our only struggle, but Looker recently addressed this with a major upgrade.

We have used Looker in our product for 9 months.

We have had no stability issues whatsoever. We use the hosted version of Looker and have had no unexpected downtime or service interruptions.

We have not had any scale issues yet. Our Looker instance is backed by Amazon Redshift, which had performed amazingly for us. Any slowness we encountered was due to our own data warehouse configuration, which we have resolved with improved indexes.

Technical support has been superb. Most answers are easily found in the user forums. Online chat has been very responsive for other questions. Our account representative has been very responsive and helpful for higher level questions related to issues like billing and configuration.

We used to have an on-premise hosted solution. We switched because the embed functionality was lacking, user-based access filtering was painful, and the visualizations were not very clean or interactive. Looker addressed all of those issues for us.

Integrating with Looker was the most seamless integration we have implemented to date. We had the initial schema live in a matter of hours, and embedded the dashboards into our web application in days. We are a technical software development organization. Our data warehouse and ETLs were already functioning, so the results could vary depending on the team's readiness.

Make sure you shop around and understand the real costs of the competition. Looker does not host your data, so be sure to include the cost of any data warehouses you may use and any ETLs that need to be developed.

Before licensing Looker, we evaluated a lot of great products, including: Domo, Tableau, and TIBCO.

When implementing the product, make sure you already understand your data and your use cases very well. Involve a data architect from the start; and definitely take advantage of Looker's amazing customer success team.

Looker is very flexible for BI. Business users can create graphs, reports, etc. using Looker's Explore functionality.

Looker offers incredible business visualization and analytical tools: graphs, charts, tables, and single numbers. Each analysis can be saved in a ‘Look’ and added to a dashboard for reporting purposes. We use these dashboards for KPI reports which are emailed on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis. These are essential for users to monitor their performance, indicate progress, and catch issues.

For instance, if I had data on users who ran a marathon, their times for each mile, and final time, I could create a table that organizes the runner by completion time. I could also visualize in a time series chart how each runner progressed through the race. I could have reports emailed whenever the most recent race occurred so that I could see the updated metrics that mattered to me.

Looker Transforms SQL with it’s LookML syntax. Looker provides end-users with visualization tools, Saved as individual “Looks” or grouped into a dashboard, so that it is easy to gain insights about their data. The UI is designed so that these users can easily choose what parameters are relevant to their queries, without knowing SQL to perform analysis. Admin’s can spend more time with advanced queries or thoughtful data visualization because Looker simplifies SQL logic for most queries.

Features related to visualization should continue to be improved. While these are strong as they are now, there's always a unique way to visualize data to improve your understanding about an organization.

For our use case (business intelligence, data visualization), Looker is fantastic. I suppose that being the best within a focused, valuable segment of the market is the most important thing, but for those who demand being the best at all sorts of data analysis, Looker could continue to expand its capabilities. For instance, they could offer 3D charts for even deeper insights. However, this might be outside the scope of expectations for this product.

I think that their features are impressive as is, and their product team continues to excel at creating features for users to extract interesting and actionable information from their data.

I have been using Looker one year and 9 months.

We did not encounter any issues with stability.

So far we did not encounter any issues with scalability. I'd imagine that issues with company data architecture and unthoughtful organization of Looker could hamper its effectiveness.

They're on top of their game. They are knowledgeable about their product and proactive in resolving issues.

This was our first BI product.

Initial setup was fairly straightforward. Granting Looker write privileges to a replica database improves the ability to utilize advanced queries with reduced wait time via 'persisted derived tables'.

Review how you intend to use Looker. Is it purely internal? Will you have external clients viewing Looker reports? For both questions, how many people will need to have Looker access, and which reports are relevant to which people in the organization?

We did not evaluate other options before choosing this product.

You should know what it's good for. It's great for enabling business insights via its data visualization tools. Scheduled reports are fantastic for keeping teams updated on progress towards accomplishing goals or identifying issues before they become critical. Having someone who is experienced with SQL and intuition in UX write the LookML, so that it is easy for the familiar business user to explore the data to answer their questions. Looker's discourse offers deeper analysis opportunities that can guide analysts in better utilizing LookML as well.

The LookML model provides a single source of truth, which allows us to democratize the data analysis process in our company, getting more people's hands on the data, while still having confidence that the results they obtain will be accurate.

Looker greatly reduced the strain on the few SQL-proficient people in our organization. People who were previously waiting to receive data can now get it themselves and answer their own questions. The ease with which questions can be answered and explored leads to more interesting questions being asked and data being used more broadly across the company.

There are a few areas of the product where there hasn't been enough time spent making the interface user-friendly. Creating complex filters on reports or dashboard-wide filters, for example, requires guessing at the appropriate syntax, rather than having the super easy to use dropdowns that are available for simple filters.

4 months

Only a few intermittent and usually minor bugs.

No.

Excellent. The chat support always responds quickly and is helpful. Some weekend support would be nice.

We previously just ran our analytics out of Google Sheets with charts based on queries of our database each week. We reached a size where this was no longer feasible and we needed a more robust data warehouse and BI stack.

Very complex setup process that involves modeling your entire database in LookML. As noted above, this model is extremely valuable when completed, but the setup process is lengthy. Looker is aware of this and requires you to receive some training/support from them to get your model off the ground when you sign up, but even with this assistance you still have to spend a ton of your own time completing the model, especially compared with the setup time of other tools in this space.

The pricing model makes sense, but can be very expensive, potentially prohibitively so for smaller companies.

Yes, Tableau and Chartio.

Looker is an extremely valuable product that can really transform your company's ability to use data to answer challenging questions. It does require a significant investment, both of money and time, to use it successfully, so it shouldn't be purchased if there's not a willingness to devote resources to it both for the initial setup and on an ongoing basis.

SQL runner: Instead of having to connect to a slave DB, I can use the SQL runner in Looker to run SQL queries, which is more efficient in my opinion.

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

There is a lot of customization that we needed/need to build ourselves. Other BI tools have more out of the box. For example, products like RJ Metrics and Google Analytics come with pre-built dashboards based on your data; examples such as conversion rate over time or sales by product. We had to build those in Looker ourselves.

Also, it is often slow.

I have used it for 10 months.

I have not encountered any stability issues.

Technical support 9/10.

We previously used RJ Metrics. I was not part of decision to switch.

I was not involved, but before choosing this product, they evaluated Domo.

You must have a strong engineering team and a team member dedicated to set-up and customization of product.