TrustRadius Insights for Looker are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, third party data sources.
Pros
Customizable Data Visualizations: Users have expressed appreciation for the platform's customizable and unique data visualizations, enabling tailored reports and dashboards to meet individual needs. The variety of dashboards with interactive visualizations and filters is praised for providing valuable insights into data.
Effective AI Automation: Many reviewers have highlighted the platform's effective use of AI in automating data-driven tasks, contributing to streamlined processes and informed decision-making. Automated data aggregations, data segmentation, and connection to multiple data sources streamline data processing.
Ease of Use: The user-friendly interface has been noted by users for facilitating efficient work, reducing the learning curve, and enabling individuals with less technical knowledge to navigate the platform seamlessly. Compatibility with Google Analytics for Firebase enhances the overall data analysis experience.
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Looker Reviews
8 Reviews
Engineering
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Looker currently is being used by our organization to make business decisions on buying or selling inventory in the ad tech space. The key decisions being made allow for the KPIs to give a larger return on investment or minimize cap losses based on the reporting the metrics that looker provides for us.
Pros
Ease of use of report creation
SQL syntax to modify or create reports
Drag and drop functionalities
Dashboard creation
Cons
More data source connections
Licensing model
Integration with Active Directory or LDAP. Only OKTA for now.
Likelihood to Recommend
If you are looking at Looker for key performance metrics for IT-related things (like a data dog aspect), this will not be the use case you would want to use Looker. This is great for looking at the overall performance of sales, inventory, and dashboards of information related to the business itself.
Looker was being used by the entire organization. We also wanted to use Looker externally for our merchant dashboards, but that option turned out to be too expensive. We focused more on using it internally by our sales, finance, marketing, and engineering teams to build dashboards that we could use for internal analytics.
Pros
We were able to create a data model that was consistent with all users.
We were able to customize our dashboards to our needs.
Cons
Very simple tasks are very complicated in Looker. It is complicated for users to be able to create their own calculation, as these measures have to be added to the data model.
Very simple calculations are complicated to add to the data model.
Likelihood to Recommend
Looker is extremely well suited for a large company that can devote a large number of resources to running and maintaining Looker. It is also great if you have a large analytics initiative and you need a consistent data model in order to avoid different analytics based on the same topic.
Our organization is using Looker to provide data access to the entire organization, build for scale, and to enable all departments to pull their own data.
Pros
Able to connect to multiple different data sources
Easy data filtering and navigation
Clean visualizations and easy to download the data
Cons
Looker lacks the ability to provide 'and' operators when filtering. Only 'or' is provided
Looker lacks the ability to auto create a data dictionary for defined dimensions and measures within the software. A person must access the API to create one, which is rather inconvenient
Looker lacks the ability to display descriptions on the Lookml Dashboard view, which is a list of dashboards where descriptions are not displayed
Likelihood to Recommend
Looker is well-suited to visually display and scale data accessibility, and is a fantastic BI tool. The tool enables the end user to pull the data they are looking for and minimizes the need for an ad-hoc reporting team.
We use Looker to build dashboards to serve each area of the business: clinical, financial, marketing, and supply chain.
Pros
The granular permissions sets allow a large amount of control over what users can see and do.
Views, models, and (optionally) dashboards are version-controlled and stored in a git repo of your choosing. This is indispensable for having peace of mind when performing large refactors.
Incredible customer support offered conveniently via live chat within the app. Feature requests are always taken seriously and you can check back anytime to see where it is in the queue.
Option to implement custom D3 visualizations.
Cons
There could be more stock visualizations.
The delineation between user-defined dashboards and LookML-defined dashboards is confusing and disjointed.
Likelihood to Recommend
Looker is best for environments in which users are empowered to perform some of their own exploration and analysis. Although it is an excellent dashboard tool in its own right, its potential isn’t realized until data models specific to each line of business are created and users understand how to explore their own data.
Looker is one of the best tools for monitoring dashboards and report generations. It is used widely over the organization. It helped to migrate from the legacy email reports to dynamic dashboards and report creation. Business Analytics and higher management heavy rely on looker for the trend of sales, expenses and many other use cases.
Pros
Helps to dynamically create filters.
Easy user interface.
Can connect to multiple datasources with ease.
Representation of data in different formats : graphs, stats.
Can share the looks to different teams and assign appropriate permissions for individual look.
Can include multiple looks within one single dashboard.
Cons
Creates cache data in the internal looker DB which consumes much space. Would be great if it has some garbage collection technique.
2 Factor authentication to user login will add more value to its security.
Would be great to download the looks and send through an email.
Likelihood to Recommend
Looker is well suited to showcase the company progress and trend visually where the data is noisy and huge. Multiple types of data visualization can be included in a single frame. Best in Dynamic dashboard creation and data projection in real time. Less suited when OLAP datasources are connected which increases the data retrieval time and loading to looker is slow.
The entire organization uses Looker. It's the primary interface to the database for all non-engineering teams. We have dashboards for both historical analysis and real-time insight. We also run frequent one-off analysis for all sorts of reasons. In general, Looker is the default place to go in our organization to ask questions of our data. As the head of engineering, I want Looker to continue to be the primary user interface to our data going forward. We rely on Looker instead of creating bespoke custom tools.
Pros
Makes fundamental query building blocks easily reusable by others.
Provides built-ins, shortcuts and aliases for most common query functionality. Saves you the hassle of writing raw SQL for the basics.
Love the share feature with the short URLs. Very easy to quickly share information across the team.
Cons
The drag-n-drop feature to customize dashboard layout is nearly impossible to use with a dashboard of any significant size.
I would love to see a folder or namespace structure for organizing looks. Right now it's just a single giant list, disambiguated only by the display name.
Likelihood to Recommend
Looker is great for both technical and semi-technical audiences. It works best for us as an interface to the data for everyone outside of engineering. However, I'd say Looker is still very much a "power user" tool, and I would not recommend it to a team with limited technical proficiency.
Looker is used across our organization for business analysis. We also use Looker as a platform for customer-facing metrics.
Pros
Seamless integration with Amazon's Redshift.
Visualization without additional software development.
Painless user management and information segmentation.
Cons
Separation of development and production data and source code. However, great strides have been made here.
Likelihood to Recommend
Well suited for teams that wish to focus on software development and not BI development. Looker has the cloud architecture that we believe all next-gen BI platforms must have. We chose them because they seemed to have the right thesis and the ability to deliver continuous improvements. We've not been disappointed.
Looker is being used across the entire organization. The strategic and business areas use it to get an overview of several aspects, especially, revenue related. Marketing people use it a lot because of most of our campaigns are performance based. The content area uses it to see if they are doing things right (checking users' engagement). Although IT is not working with it, Looker frees resources from this department since most of queries were created by them.
Pros
Easy to set up and, at the same time, allows more control from administrators that really know what the data is
Very straightforward for end users
Support is very good: they answer very quickly
Cons
Some specific queries still are not supported or have to be done via some tweaks
I don't know if it is possible but I had a problem that I had to create several explorers with the same views depending on where the from clause is used. This is very confusing for end users: sometimes they don't know which Explorer they should use.
Likelihood to Recommend
Looker performs well if there is someone with a technical background (SQL) and that knows about the data. If nobody who knows the data model knows how to create queries (especially to configure), the team will have a bad time configuring it.
