The perfect solution for our stage business

I could not be happier with Looker. My one hesitation in recommending it is that other tools seemed to be able to provide 80% of the value at 20% of the cost, but I've only demoed those tools and not actually used them so I'm not sure if they could actually deliver.

Pros

Looker is incredibly easy to use for a casual user, which most of our users are. As soon as your email is activated, you have access to the product and new users need very little direction to start getting value out of it.

Cons

Relative to other BI tools, the advanced charting functionality is somewhat limited, but frankly that's not the main reason we bought Looker. Data scientists can use another tool of their choice, we have Looker for people who aren't data scientists.

Looker Review

Pros

Easy to create dashboards without engineers needing to write code.

Cons

Still not very good yet for a multi-tenant embedded environment. Needs a lot of work to set up and the API is slow.

Data mining with a professional touch

Great tool it gives the organisation a touch of professionalism in data analysis processes.

Pros

Modeling platform which allows the me to codify data visualization using a proprietary modeling language. The self-service visualization tools that allows end users to access the benefits of data analysis. Looker has one of the best user interface on market very easy to use and in my organisation it very useful because it saves time and costs of training.

Cons

Integration with my business has not been difficult at all but the difficulty came from the product's need for a lot of processing power and its use of a lot of RAM.

Controlled Analytics Exploration

Like I said, it's a great tool for analysts that don't need a lot of flexibility or maybe just aren't used to working with a lot of data. To get the full value out of this software, you'll need a core group of experienced Data Analysts that can learn fast (to learn Lookers Table Calculation code which is similar to SQL) who can build a bunch of dashboards and views. You really don't want people who aren't savvy with data doing a lot of the creating because measures are always aggregated based on the dimensions you pull into each table...if a user forgets to add a specific dimension then measures could show the wrong value. This could be offset by having really good developers who architect the data in a way that doesn't allow this to happen.

Pros

It's a great data exploration tool for users who normally would get anxious when given a large dataset in something like Excel. It's generally simple to use and there can be unlimited Viewers (users at the lowest permissions level) through the enterprise product. Data Visualization is essentially done for you and Exploers (users at the second level of permissions) can build new visualizations & turn them into interactive dashboards. On the Looker platform, Explorers can locate a view (called an Explore) and then are given a list of dimensions and measures they can pull into a table. Users can create new dimensions using calculated fields and then save their views so any users with Viewer permissions (and up) can see what was put together.

Cons

With simplicity comes lack of flexibility. More skilled data analysts will want more flexibility than Looker can provide but at the same time you need to have highly skilled Data Analysts to be the Developers (high level of permissions) to set up the data so that less skilled analysts (the users who benefit from Looker most) who are Explorers don't build views that grossly misrepresent the data. My biggest pet peeve with this software as an Explorer is that you cannot make calculations on the base data...only the data that you pull into your table (called table calculations). That is a major feature that Tableau has that Looker does not have at the Explorer permission level. Of course developers can use LookML (Lookers data language) to create a new column...but a Developer license is more expensive and creating the fields take time and it's something you constantly will need.

Excellent BI tool

In general it's really helpful and intuitive, after switching from other product it took very short time to get used to looker

Pros

It's really user friendly and easy to present or store data from other sources. It has a lot of chart types and ways for presenting data.

Cons

Sometimes it lags when using big data sets, so it takes some time to render the complete report. When building a report dimensions search also get some lag.

Great BI Tool, easy to use, deploy and manage, both by developers and business users

It helping us give the business users access to our data models and get business insights. Our R&D team is monitoring deployment of product using this data. We are also give customer access to their data (with row level security)

Pros

very quick deployment, self serve abilities for the business users are very high. Mediation layer management is very good, it is "Code" based and not setup based so it is very easy to replicate/versioning and find "Hacks" to many needs, and versioning is managed by GIT. Support is amazing, always available.

Cons

Still lacking a little bit on the graphic side, Would really love to have some more buildin dynamic graphs.

It's the best business intelligence software we been using for our analytics and tracking

It was nice enough to use the Looker at first time. My team has now the extra analysis to look and and make decisions.

Pros

I liked this software a lot, it has the nice analytics and stats for our ecommerce business and it's the one we used a lot. It's also for our affiliate tracking we used to measure the performance at all.

Cons

It's the complete tool to start with, we been using this for last 2 years now and our team and I liked it.

Great BI

I track our business main goals daily and the visualization Looker provides covers our needs perfectly.

Pros

DS team creates dashboards mainly for non DS specialists in our company, they can easily track product lifetime, download the data into excel if needed. It improved my quality of daily work.

Cons

It gets down very often, requires very good internet connection and building dashboards is not very easy and intuitive for non professionals, requires time to get used to it.

Great software with continuus updates

Pros

I like that you truly do not have to understand SQL to end up being an expert and ask the ideal concerns in Looker. Looker is continuously making updates, they deliver really rapidly. I have a favorable outlook of this item.

Cons

I dislike for how long it takes given that it never ever truly caches the information. I need to truly make certain the questions I compose or the concerns I ask are really restricted as an outcome.

Great tool for building customized dashboard and KPI tracking reports

I use Looker every week to track the performance of different channels for user acquisition. It allows me to quickly understand which channels are over or underperforming so that we can adjust the strategy accordingly. I really enjoy my experience with this tool.

Pros

Looker is a very complete tool that allows you to build customized dashboard and KPI tracking reports. I really enjoy the level of customization it allows (different type of charts, tables, etc.) as well as how easy it is to share it with your team. I recommend this tool!

Cons

Looker requires a bit of technical knowledge about data analytics in order to customize some of the tables and reports. If you don't have much knowledge in this field, it might be a bit hard to create the reports and tables with the data you're looking for.

Powerful for the Data Scientist, Friendly for the Business User

Pros

When I first saw Looker (during a long BI evaluation process where we demo'd perhaps 5-10 tools) I knew it was what I had been hoping for in a BI vendor. The ease of dragging dimensions and metrics onto a canvas, the fluid way that you could generate reports, and the simplicity of drilling down into the source data all suggested this was a tool that had been built well from the ground up. Other vendors seemed to trap you into a narrow view of your metrics, but with Looker the only restrictions were the ones built into your data model. It could easily flex to accommodate whatever data you wanted to look at. The LookML language and the way Looker is designed to interact with your data is pretty brilliant. Even a non-data scientist and non-SQL user like me could get the hang of the basics ;) The range of options, the configurability, the flexibility...all aces. Really you only get stuck by your imagination, the tool is powerful enough that you can solve most problems if you have the know-how. The team is also great. Awesome culture, friendly support. They have a continual flow of new features and improvements.

Cons

You do need a good BI person or ETL developer to really get the most out of this tool. Setting up your data model really well and going to the outer limits to solve some particularly difficult queries are all things I would have had a hard time doing without technical resources on the team. Of course it's possible Looker helps with a lot of this during implementation; we pretty much controlled our own because we had the folks in house to do it.

Looker allows everyone in your company, even the less tech-savvy, to make data-driven decisions.

We get to force-multiply our impact by making it easy for users in all departments to make data-driven decisions and help allow that to drive their day-to-day.

Pros

I love the customization of Looker, and that you can put large amounts of data into the hands of anyone -- in a way that makes sense [to them]! While their product is great, it speaks volumes to the team. It's an amazing group of people that continue to receive feedback from their customers and iterate time and time again on their product. They truly care about data and their customers, and they want to empower them the best they can.

Cons

When modeling views, I wish you could define better filters for measures but it's limited. There are workarounds, meaning modeling out several additional dimensions to arrive at the measure you need to pull regularly, but it'd be much more efficient to allow for measures to be more nuanced. Large dashboards (with 25+ tiles) can take awhile to load, which is understandable. Once their "merge results" feature is fully rolled out and we're able to save them as new tiles or looks, it should help resolve the need for so many tiles. Neither of these two things are a big deal, and I wouldn't let this deter you from considering this software.

Looker transforms companies

Pros

It's a great product for giving people in all departments of your company access to data and allow them to explore what your data can provide. Rather than having to always go to the Business Intelligence or Analytics team, people of any level can query data without any SQL knowledge or understanding and yield results that are either directly actionable or ask more questions that can be answered using Looker. We ran an initial 30 days trial with a view that only our analysts and BI team members would use it. By the end of the 30 days, everyone from the COO down to the account teams were using it. It's amazing. Furthermore, the vendor is smart, responsive and constantly improving the product, delivering a new version approximately every month. Their customer service is second-to-none and they are always happy to hear about new features that you need in the product. Very pleased overall with their service, strategy and plan to expand our use of them to our clients over the next few months.

Cons

Looker are still very heavily US based. They have just started an EU office, but support is still largely limited to US West Coast hours (although they seem to wake up at stupid o'clock to deal with some of our issues and plan to have support in the EU soon).

Data Models, Security, and Amazing Customer Support

Looker is quickly becoming our go-to for reporting and dashboarding for anything requiring more than one data source (and some that are based on just one). Paired with a kick-ass centralized data warehouse (we use Snowflake), Looker lets us roll things out very quickly (provided our data infrastructure is in good shape). It did take a while to get going with Looker because it lays on top of the existing data infrastructure. Now that we have quite a bit of strong infrastructure in place in our centralized data warehouse, we are able to produce data products in Looker quite quickly.

Pros

Provisioning security allows us to control the user experience (and only show users things they would actually care about). This makes a dashboard or data product rollout far smoother. Additionally, the customer support (especially through the chat interface) is absolutely fantastic. Because Looker creates a custom URL for each explore you're working on, you can share with Customer Support your exact problem and work together to find a solution.

Cons

Looker Sales told us beforehand that it "writes the most performant SQL possible." I have not found this to be the case, as it often casts and does a few other things (I suspect to make it runnable no matter how you've set up your data). There are some limitations on the visualizations, etc., but Looker Customer Service has been super responsive when those come up.

Provides valuable insights for all users (Technical and End Users)

This software has truly put our leadership team above the benchmark with data efficiencies and making informed data driven decisions.

Pros

Looker is incredibly easy to use, and it easily scales with your technical abilities. As an Analyst, I can create very easy to use self serve reports for stakeholders. This saves time and effort for both parties. Looker also has a very intuitive way of organizing data and letting you quickly visualize data in your warehouse. It is reliable and the data visualization options are abundant. Our leadership team is miles ahead of others I've seen because of how quickly they were able to learn how to use Looker.

Cons

I don't necessarily see this as a con, however I think there is a big opportunity to help guide some new users through some of the more technical setup of Looker. I relied on a mentor to help take me through LookML and Models/Explores, but I would have loved to have some in product help with this.

A game changing data tool

Looker is a game changing tool insofar as it provides a 21st century approach to data tooling that massively amplifies how organisations can get access to, explore and power applications through data without making sacrifices from an accuracy perspective. Looker's company culture is fantastic and the focus on customer support really helps to extent the impact of the product itself.

Pros

* LookML because it enables a scalable semantic layer wherein business rules can be defined in a single place and logic is code based thereby enabling version control, testing and auditing. * Extendability because the data platform focus enables businesses to serve data to applications and people through a single component * Customer experience focus

Cons

* It can be hard to navigate the huge volumes of content that users build on Looker and find the canonical/VIP products that are the foundation for any company

We've been using Looker since about an year. Our leadership loves it!

Our business users love the self-serv options that this provides. It drastically cut down the effort our analysts have to spend answering routine questions and allow them to focus more on the value added activities.

Pros

Things I like about this product: 1. Ease of use by our users - very intutive 2. Integration with our big data platform and databases. We use ours with Redshift and Aurora and they take most advantage of both systems. 3. Their super awesome customer support - always available chat who are really good at what they are doing. 4. Custom install options along with their hosted solutions. 5. Their whole team is involved with the product and customers top down. Really appreciate their responsiveness and customer-centric approach.

Cons

We really don't care about visualizations, but that can use some improvement to those who care. The LDAP integration setup is a pain. It works well once it's all setup. There is no roll-back once a version is installed. Work around is to restore from a backup. Would love to be able to do that as sometimes things don't always work the way we are used to and might require a rollback.

Great product!

Looker has allowed us to make clean, consistent data for all of our campaigns available across our agency and externally to clients. This has significantly sped up the reporting process and increased the amount of time that we've been able to put into actual analysis. Also appreciate that Looker is constantly adding new functionality, and looking forward to see more chart types and integrations with other sources in the future.

Pros

Looker has been a game changer for us. It connects easily to our database and allows internal users to dig into our data and optimize media campaigns without having to write SQL code. The dashboards are easy to create and customize, and the fact that it can be embedded into a website allows us to share with clients without having to mess around with permissions.

Cons

Not exactly a con, but we tend to join most of our tables and clean our data in snowflake rather than Looker, so I can't speak to the advanced develop/derived table features.

When analytics becomes part of your operations -

Pros

Everything. Looker made it sexy for BI developers, and intuitive easy to use for business user. Their support is extremely knowledgeable and always available if you need any help. Their engineers are brilliant and their hard work is allowing frequent releases that are going in the right directions. Looker is customer driven and will deliver what makes sense for every user. We love the creativity and flexibility this tool is offering us, as we are able to manipulate LookML to create anything, from data extract to Process automation. Their growth is EXPONENTIAL. Their Doc is well maintained so you are never lost. Their community became part of their offering, you cannot find this elsewhere.

Cons

We have been satisfied since day 1! I dislike the fact that our internal users are not curious enough (or don't get it) to explore data on their own. Maybe a different UI would help people discover on their own.

Looker

Looker has helped us provide higher quality information to our users in a more attractive and efficient manner. Our users are able to customize and share content in ways they couldn't before. Looker has eliminated manual report runs in many cases and definitely has created efficiencies that save time and money.

Pros

Looker allows you to work with virtually any data warehouse, and setup is not difficult. LookML is easy to work with, and allows non-developers to create content for their teams. Embedding Looker in our web app was relatively painless, and is a big improvement over our prior reporting system. Sharing content is super easy with scheduled reporting, and the variety of formats gives us solutions for different types of users.

Cons

I would like to see more visualization options, and enhanced capabilities with scheduling.