Looker reviews

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.

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.

Looker allows companies to create all business intelligence initiatives using comprehensive data sorting and analysis features, from ideation to visualization. The platform is professional, easy to use, and integrates with many other programs, making data entry and export a breeze. Looker enables non-technical managers to use reports and dashboards to explore, discover, and view data dynamically. It also stores all data in the cloud, allowing the members to work together at any time and get the best results.

Looker is a great program that efficiently produces the best analytics, and with proper training, all members will complete tasks as required.

The option to pull a lot of data in an organized fashion.

This software RARELY works, it's completely glitchy. I use it, well, I attempt to use it, daily. But I continuously receive the No Date to Report message. It completely hinders my job as I need the data from the reporting. Seriously, it is glitchy every single day.

Looker's user-friendly interface made it easy for us explore and use. It has good drag-and-drop features , which made it easy for us to create dashboards and reports. Looker's data modeling capabilities enabled us to create and manage data models that can be used across multiple data sources. This provided us a unified view of data and made it easy for us to analyze and explore. It has the ability to add custom visualizations and integrations. we also were able to share reports and dashboards with business users , making it easy to collaborate on data analysis and insights.

Looker's data source support is limited. We require significant training to fully utilize its features and functionalities. Its customization capabilities are limited compared to other BI platforms.

For your developers, the customer service is superior. They also do a great job reaching out to your primary users. With respect to frontend users, those using it for simpler data retrieval/review, their interface is rather easy to use and logical to work through. They do a lot to make the system as simple as possible. Only your BI developers and/or data engineering team can clutter the space.

If you decide to purchase the non-customized version, the color palette Looker uses is rather bland (More noticeable to executives and heavy users-most users will be fine with it though). The company's integrations are rather limited, but supposed to improve with Looker 5 (via the Action Hub). However, it seems that most integrations will require purchasing from third parties, instead of being a Looker hosted and "controlled" solution you purchase through them. That complicates the process.

I like creating dashboards for clients. Looker has many different visualization options to choose from and these dashboards can be sent out on a regular recurring basis for our clients.

I wish there was a way to take the data visualization and embed that into a Powerpoint presentation. Sure, we can do this with taking a screenshot, and then pasting into Powerpoint, but I'd love to be able to manipulate the size, font, etc to fit with what I'm trying to show in Powerpoint.

Looker is a great tool for KPIs and data visualization. It's powerful enough to handle many large queries and return simplified dashboards for end users.

There is certainly a learning curve to using Looker and some of the shortcoming in "and/or" filtering make the need to leverage custom filters even higher.

We have used Google Data studio in the past and now using Looker for creating dashboards and building reports. This has been very useful tool for us to compare data and infer insights out of it. The best part of this tool is the data gets refreshed automatically and the reports can be checked realtime.

No issues using Looker. It works great and loads data pretty quickly.

It makes our reporting easier and monitors our volumes

None so far, will there will be will keep you posted

I love the fact that if your data team has the correct reports I can see valuable insights on my prospects and customers to sell in a more personalized way.

Sometimes there is some downtime with Looker, but it is quite rare.

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.

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.

* 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

* 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

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.

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).

Looker is extremely intuitive and accessible for end users. This has made training and driving adoption across the company a breeze. It has really opened up our data to a huge number of non-technical users. Their customer support is also excellent.

As part of our evaluation we trialed several other providers that I think would have provided about 80% of the value at a dramatically lower cost. For our organization it made sense to go with the best in class, but for a more cost-constrained organization there might be better options out there.

It's really easy to create dashboards and reports. Even though we need to code some things it allows to be really flexible in the way you create and display data.

I had to learn more technical information, the code, and how to work with development and live versions of the models.

Looker allows data to be accessible by team members who do not have technical skills like SQL or Python. It's user interface is easy to use; quickly and easily one can have impressive visualizations encompassing complex data sets. Looker is a powerful tool, useful for adding data visualizations to reports, making data-driven business decisions, and any other task requiring you to analyze data. Looker has also put out a great series of instructional videos which are helpful in learning how to use the program optimally.

The initial setup and development of Looker requires time, attention, and work. The software is a great user interface to access data, but configuring the program to access your data requires a lot of programming, troubleshooting, and general work from the data science team. The utility of the program is definitely worth the work, but you should not expect to begin using the program as soon as you get it--it requires some setup.

Flexibility to transform data before visualization and the variety of visualization formats.

not that flexible to share data with 3rd party users.

Looker offers data reporting tools and options, and it doesn't require deep SQL knowledge. It has a clean and well-organized user interface and helps you create reports and dashboard with only a click of a button. It is very easy to use and you don't have to have any experience with data extrapolation or reporting.

The pricing is somewhat high, but if you are a larger company it might be worth the money.

This is our go to software in our company. It's the place where we communicate our reports and metrics to others. Easily used by everyone from programmer to a manager. It has layers of types of users so everyone knows their place around.

As an admin user of this software i sometimes find it that there is a lack of aggregating options when i query for certain through Looker. But all in all it's a masterpiece in your browser.

Ease of use, monetary value and ability to prototype and show data quickly. Their CS team (our account exec and technical support rep are amazing) and support are the best vendors I've ever worked with.

Performance issues, it's a new product so some standard features it's missing - around mapping separate projects together, some access/security features, and lack of self-service model layer.

- It's pretty easy to work with once you have a working sample
- Creating a chart is simple and creating a dashboard is very intuitive - you can just explore and save a few looks to your dashboard in a single run.
- Warns about errors right on the spot when editing a view

It's just not very mature yet. I don't see why I should hit the "clear cache & refresh" multiple times before it actually gives me a result from now and not from 4 days ago.

Also, it's missing some features like a custom sort of the results order. It's important when you're putting things on a dashboard.

It's also letting you validate and commit and only when running it returns SQL errors if there are any. I think it should look for syntax errors at an earlier stage.

customizing the column names is done the wrong way - you can't edit the current name, you need to retype it (why? such a silly feature)

Lastly, customizing the colors is really not intuitive. I figured it out but I'd do it differently.

We use Looker to gather data for team productivity and statistics. Easy to view and the dash boards show all the information we need for our partner venues too at a glance.

When filtering data on looker it can be quite long winded and the layout I feel good be improved to make it clearer.

Able to rapidly organise very large data sets and share dashboards and views. Fairly straightforward to build queries even for non-technical

Some limitations in reporting data views (e.g. Histograms) and doesn't have wide range of options for exporting to other reporting packages

I love how power Looker is and their customer service is above and beyond. They've been super helpful with everything.

There's not much I don't like about Looker. There is a little bit of learning curve when starting off but other than there's nothing to not like.

I am able to pull in different data from multiple platforms to get a better scope and understanding of the work done and work yet to do. The team has more visibility to everything.

Sometimes it takes a while to load pages. Each cell loads individually, but it can still take a bit to see the data.