Grafana vs. Looker

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Grafana
Score 8.7 out of 10
N/A
Grafana is a data visualization tool developed by Grafana Labs in New York. It is available open source, managed (Grafana Cloud), or via an enterprise edition with enhanced features. Grafana has pluggable data source model and comes bundled with support for popular time series databases like Graphite. It also has built-in support for cloud monitoring vendors like Amazon Cloudwatch, Microsoft Azure and SQL databases like MySQL. Grafana can combine data from many places into a single dashboard.
$8
per month up to 1 active user
Looker
Score 8.5 out of 10
N/A
Looker is a BI application with an analytics-oriented application server that sits on top of relational data stores. It includes an end-user interface for exploring data, a reusable development paradigm for data discovery, and an API for supporting data in other systems.N/A
Pricing
GrafanaLooker
Editions & Modules
Grafana Cloud - Pro
$8
per month up to 1 active user
Grafana Cloud - Free
Free
10k metrics + 50GB logs + 50GB traces up to 3 active users
Grafana Cloud - Advanced
Volume Discounts
custom data usage custom active users
Grafana - Enterprise Stack
Custom Pricing
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
GrafanaLooker
Free Trial
YesYes
Free/Freemium Version
YesNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeRequired
Additional DetailsMust contact sales team for pricing.
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
GrafanaLooker
Features
GrafanaLooker
BI Standard Reporting
Comparison of BI Standard Reporting features of Product A and Product B
Grafana
8.0
Ratings
5% below category average
Looker
8.4
Ratings
3% above category average
Pixel Perfect reports6.00 Ratings8.00 Ratings
Customizable dashboards10.00 Ratings9.00 Ratings
Report Formatting Templates8.00 Ratings8.30 Ratings
Ad-hoc Reporting
Comparison of Ad-hoc Reporting features of Product A and Product B
Grafana
6.8
Ratings
16% below category average
Looker
8.5
Ratings
5% above category average
Drill-down analysis6.00 Ratings8.10 Ratings
Formatting capabilities8.00 Ratings7.80 Ratings
Integration with R or other statistical packages5.00 Ratings8.80 Ratings
Report sharing and collaboration8.00 Ratings9.20 Ratings
Report Output and Scheduling
Comparison of Report Output and Scheduling features of Product A and Product B
Grafana
8.4
Ratings
0% below category average
Looker
8.8
Ratings
6% above category average
Publish to Web7.00 Ratings8.30 Ratings
Publish to PDF9.00 Ratings9.10 Ratings
Report Versioning9.00 Ratings8.60 Ratings
Report Delivery Scheduling8.00 Ratings9.10 Ratings
Delivery to Remote Servers9.00 Ratings00 Ratings
Data Discovery and Visualization
Comparison of Data Discovery and Visualization features of Product A and Product B
Grafana
7.7
Ratings
6% below category average
Looker
7.0
Ratings
13% below category average
Pre-built visualization formats (heatmaps, scatter plots etc.)9.00 Ratings8.10 Ratings
Location Analytics / Geographic Visualization9.00 Ratings8.10 Ratings
Predictive Analytics7.00 Ratings4.60 Ratings
Pattern Recognition and Data Mining6.00 Ratings00 Ratings
Access Control and Security
Comparison of Access Control and Security features of Product A and Product B
Grafana
-
Ratings
Looker
8.3
Ratings
2% below category average
Multi-User Support (named login)00 Ratings8.70 Ratings
Role-Based Security Model00 Ratings8.20 Ratings
Multiple Access Permission Levels (Create, Read, Delete)00 Ratings8.10 Ratings
Report-Level Access Control00 Ratings8.20 Ratings
Mobile Capabilities
Comparison of Mobile Capabilities features of Product A and Product B
Grafana
-
Ratings
Looker
6.2
Ratings
23% below category average
Responsive Design for Web Access00 Ratings7.50 Ratings
Mobile Application00 Ratings5.00 Ratings
Dashboard / Report / Visualization Interactivity on Mobile00 Ratings7.40 Ratings
Best Alternatives
GrafanaLooker
Small Businesses
Supermetrics
Supermetrics
Score 10.0 out of 10
BrightGauge
BrightGauge
Score 9.1 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
Supermetrics
Supermetrics
Score 10.0 out of 10
Reveal
Reveal
Score 10.0 out of 10
Enterprises
Dataiku
Dataiku
Score 7.6 out of 10
Kyvos Semantic Intelligence Layer
Kyvos Semantic Intelligence Layer
Score 9.9 out of 10
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User Ratings
GrafanaLooker
Likelihood to Recommend
9.0
(0 ratings)
8.7
(0 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
-
(0 ratings)
9.5
(0 ratings)
Usability
10.0
(0 ratings)
8.8
(0 ratings)
Availability
-
(0 ratings)
10.0
(0 ratings)
Performance
-
(0 ratings)
6.0
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
-
(0 ratings)
8.8
(0 ratings)
Implementation Rating
-
(0 ratings)
10.0
(0 ratings)
Configurability
-
(0 ratings)
10.0
(0 ratings)
Ease of integration
-
(0 ratings)
10.0
(0 ratings)
Product Scalability
-
(0 ratings)
10.0
(0 ratings)
Vendor post-sale
-
(0 ratings)
10.0
(0 ratings)
Vendor pre-sale
-
(0 ratings)
10.0
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
GrafanaLooker
Likelihood to Recommend
Just about any organization with more than one server and more than one cluster as it scales very well. Configuration of the application takes time and finesse to fine tune to where the balance of load time and getting data quickly meets. The plugins add load time but fine tuning for the application to meet demand needs nailed down at implementation
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When you need to create a centralised dashboard for multiple stakeholders that blends cross-channel reporting. As an SEO agency reporting for clients - Looker is a great solution. It's less appropriate depending on the intended users. For instance, in my experience Looker reports have been under-utilised because they're not accessed regularly, provide too much noise or often simple PDF reports are preferred
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Pros
  • Alerting through many different medium as Slack, Email, Webhook etc
  • Beautiful and unlimited number of dashboards to view your metrics and tweak them as you please
  • Log aggregation and powerful Logql to filter and view your logs
  • Microservices monitoring
  • Large number of plugins and data sources to collect your metrics from almost anywhere
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  • It is very easy to start a new dashboard and configure what you want to display by just selecting/dragging from the list of available columns.
  • It is intuitive, mainly if you use other Google services like Google Sheets.
  • The look and feel is modern and nice.
  • It it very useful to have an immediate visual overview of the data in a spreadsheet.
Read full review
Cons
  • Documentation needs to be more clarified since it can be confusing for beginners
  • Notification alert message templates need to be simplified
Read full review
  • I wish I could get more granular in the Google ad data, such as down to the campaign type, instead of having to see only all campaigns.
  • The setup can be time-consuming if you're not using the product regularly.
  • Editing the dashboard requires a few logins; I wish it was more seamless.
Read full review
Likelihood to Renew
No answers on this topic
We are very haooy with Looker, it provides us with all the funciomalities we need for both the day to day oerformance tracking and longer periods reporting. It is easy to use for account managers, configurable and customizable for soecialists and what is most imoortant, our clinets generally really love it
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Usability
Great usage in terms of monitoring of any application from backend to frontend and even any AWS resource via cloud watch and other connectors. Easy to use and configure personalised dash boarding and alerting features. Cost efficient and easy to setup and run, no mazor scaling challenges in terms of managing and maintaining the stack, easy to configure via Prometheus, influx and other connectors
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Looker is relatively easy to use, even as it is set up. The customers for the front-end only have issues with the initial setup for looker ml creations. Other "looks" are relatively easy to set up, depending on the ETL and the data which is coming into Looker on a regular basis.
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Reliability and Availability
No answers on this topic
No objections
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Performance
No answers on this topic
Somehow resources heavy, both on server and client. I recommned at least 50Mbs data rate and high performance desktop comouter to be abke to run comolex tasks and configure larger amount of data. On the other hand, the client does not need to worry when viewing, the performance is usually ok
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Support Rating
No answers on this topic
Never had to work with support for issues. Any questions we had, they would respond promptly and clearly. The one-time setup was easy, by reading documentation. If the feature is not supported, they will add a feature request. In this case, LDAP support was requested over OKTA. They are looking into it.
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Implementation Rating
No answers on this topic
Very satisfied, easy to implement
Read full review
Alternatives Considered
Grafana is more flexible, readily adopts other tools frameworks instead of forcing you to use their agent, doesn't force you into Vendor lock-in, and embraces open source, self-hosted, and Enterprise. Similar companies would like you to use their specific tooling and don't offer nearly as much flexibility. The other thing I like about Grafana is their storage usage is much lower compared to similar tools and competitors
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In my opinion, Looker is no Power BI. It is good, but I think Power BI is amazing. That said, in my experience, Power BI is nowhere near as easy to setup and report on Google services as Looker is. We plan to continue using Power BI for c-suite and corporate reporting, especially for internal databases, but will gladly use Looker for our marketing information for AdWords, Analytics, Search Console, and YouTube.
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Return on Investment
  • It has kicked out some of our paid monitoring and visualization tools.
  • Now Monitoring, Visualization and Alerting is being done in a single platform.
  • It made monitoring and visualization very easy for us.
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  • Other than some people not liking the numbers, I don't see any negative impacts; we haven't experienced that.
  • The reports help us unravel the story of our users and how they are sifting through our pages.
  • Our clients enjoy seeing the numbers to understand better what stands out on their sites.
  • The reports have helped us see what campaigns are working and where we need to tweak things.
  • The reports have enabled us to have better conversations with stakeholders about how their web pages should be modified, edited, etc., to reflect the data.
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ScreenShots

Looker Screenshots

Screenshot of a Looker dashboard with a geo chart.