Looker vs. ThoughtSpot

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
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
ThoughtSpot
Score 8.2 out of 10
N/A
ThoughtSpot is an Agentic Analytics Platform for enterprises where users ask data questions using natural language and get answers with AI. Code-first for data teams and code-free for business users, ThoughtSpot can handle large, complex cloud data at scale.
$50
per month (billed annually) per user (25-1000 users)
Pricing
LookerThoughtSpot
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
Thoughtspot Analytics - Pro
$50
per month (billed annually) per user (25-1000 users)
Thoughtspot Analytics - Enterprise
Custom
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
LookerThoughtSpot
Free Trial
YesYes
Free/Freemium Version
NoYes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeRequiredOptional
Additional DetailsMust contact sales team for pricing.
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
LookerThoughtSpot
Features
LookerThoughtSpot
BI Standard Reporting
Comparison of BI Standard Reporting features of Product A and Product B
Looker
8.3
Ratings
2% above category average
ThoughtSpot
7.6
Ratings
7% below category average
Pixel Perfect reports7.90 Ratings6.00 Ratings
Customizable dashboards8.90 Ratings9.00 Ratings
Report Formatting Templates8.30 Ratings7.70 Ratings
Ad-hoc Reporting
Comparison of Ad-hoc Reporting features of Product A and Product B
Looker
8.4
Ratings
4% above category average
ThoughtSpot
7.7
Ratings
5% below category average
Drill-down analysis8.10 Ratings9.00 Ratings
Formatting capabilities7.80 Ratings7.60 Ratings
Integration with R or other statistical packages8.70 Ratings5.40 Ratings
Report sharing and collaboration9.10 Ratings8.80 Ratings
Report Output and Scheduling
Comparison of Report Output and Scheduling features of Product A and Product B
Looker
8.7
Ratings
5% above category average
ThoughtSpot
8.8
Ratings
6% above category average
Publish to Web8.30 Ratings8.50 Ratings
Publish to PDF9.00 Ratings9.40 Ratings
Report Versioning8.50 Ratings7.90 Ratings
Report Delivery Scheduling9.10 Ratings9.10 Ratings
Delivery to Remote Servers00 Ratings9.00 Ratings
Data Discovery and Visualization
Comparison of Data Discovery and Visualization features of Product A and Product B
Looker
6.9
Ratings
14% below category average
ThoughtSpot
8.0
Ratings
0% above category average
Pre-built visualization formats (heatmaps, scatter plots etc.)8.00 Ratings7.80 Ratings
Location Analytics / Geographic Visualization8.00 Ratings8.80 Ratings
Predictive Analytics4.60 Ratings8.00 Ratings
Pattern Recognition and Data Mining00 Ratings7.60 Ratings
Access Control and Security
Comparison of Access Control and Security features of Product A and Product B
Looker
8.2
Ratings
3% below category average
ThoughtSpot
8.5
Ratings
0% above category average
Multi-User Support (named login)8.70 Ratings8.60 Ratings
Role-Based Security Model8.10 Ratings8.50 Ratings
Multiple Access Permission Levels (Create, Read, Delete)8.00 Ratings8.40 Ratings
Report-Level Access Control8.10 Ratings8.30 Ratings
Single Sign-On (SSO)00 Ratings8.60 Ratings
Mobile Capabilities
Comparison of Mobile Capabilities features of Product A and Product B
Looker
6.1
Ratings
25% below category average
ThoughtSpot
7.5
Ratings
4% below category average
Responsive Design for Web Access7.40 Ratings7.20 Ratings
Mobile Application5.00 Ratings7.30 Ratings
Dashboard / Report / Visualization Interactivity on Mobile7.20 Ratings7.10 Ratings
Application Program Interfaces (APIs) / Embedding
Comparison of Application Program Interfaces (APIs) / Embedding features of Product A and Product B
Looker
-
Ratings
ThoughtSpot
6.6
Ratings
17% below category average
REST API00 Ratings5.30 Ratings
Javascript API00 Ratings5.00 Ratings
iFrames00 Ratings8.30 Ratings
Java API00 Ratings7.00 Ratings
Themeable User Interface (UI)00 Ratings7.10 Ratings
Customizable Platform (Open Source)00 Ratings7.10 Ratings
Best Alternatives
LookerThoughtSpot
Small Businesses
BrightGauge
BrightGauge
Score 9.0 out of 10
BrightGauge
BrightGauge
Score 9.0 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
Reveal
Reveal
Score 10.0 out of 10
Reveal
Reveal
Score 10.0 out of 10
Enterprises
Kyvos Semantic Intelligence Layer
Kyvos Semantic Intelligence Layer
Score 9.9 out of 10
Kyvos Semantic Intelligence Layer
Kyvos Semantic Intelligence Layer
Score 9.9 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
LookerThoughtSpot
Likelihood to Recommend
8.7
(0 ratings)
8.4
(0 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
9.5
(0 ratings)
10.0
(0 ratings)
Usability
8.8
(0 ratings)
8.6
(0 ratings)
Availability
10.0
(0 ratings)
9.0
(0 ratings)
Performance
6.0
(0 ratings)
8.0
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
8.8
(0 ratings)
8.0
(0 ratings)
In-Person Training
-
(0 ratings)
5.0
(0 ratings)
Online Training
-
(0 ratings)
4.0
(0 ratings)
Implementation Rating
10.0
(0 ratings)
7.0
(0 ratings)
Configurability
10.0
(0 ratings)
8.0
(0 ratings)
Ease of integration
10.0
(0 ratings)
9.0
(0 ratings)
Product Scalability
10.0
(0 ratings)
8.0
(0 ratings)
Vendor post-sale
10.0
(0 ratings)
8.0
(0 ratings)
Vendor pre-sale
10.0
(0 ratings)
9.0
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
LookerThoughtSpot
Likelihood to Recommend
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
Read full review
By using the power of cloud platforms like bigquery or snowflake, ThoughtSpot can deliver performance at scale ensuring that even the largest organization can quickly analyze and visualize data. The ability to seamlessly share live dashboards fosters collaborations, ensuring everyone in the organization is working from the same data source and aligned in decision making.
Read full review
Pros
  • 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
  • Beautiful visualizations. The visuals are distinct, clean, and easy to discern from one another.
  • Intelligent querying functionality. When looking to manipulate the data, the search function makes it easy to manipulate the features in the data, along with aggregating them in the way you'd like.
  • Embedding! It has been a smooth process thus far for our product & technical teams to work with ThoughtSpot and bring it into our product.
Read full review
Cons
  • 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
  • It would be great if ThoughtSpot can add the feature to filter by clicking on visualizations. i.e if I click on a particular data point in the chart if the full dashboard can filter just for that particular data point.
  • Color coding the heatmap with different colors like green to orange to red.
Read full review
Likelihood to Renew
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
Read full review
We have had success with the initial use cases and there are more use cases that can receive return on investment. I don't give it a 10 because other products like Tableau are building functionality that may start to compete in the coming years.
Read full review
Usability
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.
Read full review
The tool is easy to use if you know what you are doing and looking for. I know as they work towards improvements and simple language it will become even easier, but as of now they are doing a great job but there is room for improvement.
Read full review
Reliability and Availability
No objections
Read full review
it's available unless there is a server or system update etc. sometimes the timing of this is bad (for example during a month end close)
Read full review
Performance
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
Read full review
It does what it is supposed to. Would be nice to have a bit more insights
Read full review
Support Rating
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.
Read full review
I give it this meeting because the team is not only help able to help us in the current solutions but also amazing and taking feedback and feeding it back to their development team which includes more products and features into ThoughtSpot
Read full review
In-Person Training
No answers on this topic
inhouse in-person training. Took a bit to long to get the basics.
Read full review
Online Training
No answers on this topic
poor instructions
Read full review
Implementation Rating
Very satisfied, easy to implement
Read full review
Understand use case and model and design accordingly
Read full review
Alternatives Considered
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.
Read full review
It is more flexible and PowerBI, easier work online, and share information with many users. Also the dashboards and beautiful, and the user experience is better. Performance used to be faster. We use Looker for different use cases but, when it comes to reporting and sharing information, ThoughSpot is much better.
Read full review
Scalability
No answers on this topic
Because it is very reliable, inside the situation, we need strong internet connection to access a lot of data but easily never had any downtime except during the upgrades
Read full review
Return on Investment
  • 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.
Read full review
  • Time to market ROI is massive vs hiring the full-time dedicated team to build and maintain a frontend multi-tenant SaaS data viz product.
  • It will be interesting to see over time how the advanced features play out in terms of usability and end value, such as Natural Search, which we are very excited about, and the machine learning tools.
Read full review
ScreenShots

Looker Screenshots

Screenshot of a Looker dashboard with a geo chart.

ThoughtSpot Screenshots

Screenshot of the ThoughtSpot home screenScreenshot of SpotIQ, which offers AI-driven insightsScreenshot of the Spotter AI agent that surfaces insights through natural language queriesScreenshot of AI Assist producing SQL in real timeScreenshot of SpotIQ, which offers AI-driven insightsScreenshot of the integration with dbt models and metrics