Overview
Product Information on Looker
What is Looker?
Looker Pricing
Overall experience with Looker
“Grouping Capabilities Excel, While Table Merging and Date Fields Need Improvement”
“LookML Supports Data Consistency While Visualization Choices Remain Restricted”
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About Company
Company Description
Googlers is a company that creates products intended to create opportunities for an extensive audience, regardless of their location across the globe. The company values diverse perspectives, imaginations and non-conformity to predefined norms and impossibilities. The goal is to build products while incorporating uniqueness of each individual involved in this process, aiming to make their products accessible and useful to all.
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Key Insights
A Snapshot of What Matters - Based on Validated User Reviews
User Sentiment About Looker
Reviewer Insights for: Looker
Deciding Factors: Looker Vs. Market Average
Performance of Looker Across Market Features
Looker Likes & Dislikes
The top features of this product are: - Grouping and Bucketing capabilities are great to get aggregated insights for a group rather than an atomized view scattered across many different categories - Chart options provided are amazing, with most of the basic charts and more being covered in the tool - Simplicity to add and remove metrics is also great. I also find the ability to create custom metrics a MUST for my quarterly and bi-annual planning operations.
Using LookML to define metadata for fields and tables is amazing, as we are able to generate it via a script developed on our side using the same DBML notation that our ELT tool uses, ensuring that both sides of our analytics infrastructure are always aligned and in-sync. Also, embedding predefined filters in a shareable URL is also a very efficient way to ensure that a stakeholder will see the same output as the person who developed the report is a huge plus.
The semantic modeling layer, which allows organizations to define metrics and business logic centrally and reuse them consistently across dashboards and analysis.
Some of the things I think could be improved are: - MERGE! Merging tables is really painful and getting charts based on merged tables is even harder. We need a way to create merged tables that are then used as an Explore themselves (without having all fields in the merged table there and with the possibility to aggregate on the merged table results) - On merging, I also had issues sometimes with the merging fields, getting an error or not being able to use the right field to merge two explores / tables - Date fields aren't great. It may be on us, but there are so many date fields out there that sometimes it's not easy to determine which one to use (even more so for new joiners)
The selection of available visualizations seems not just limited but also antiquated, with a small number of options and some very important charts missing, since the ones available at the marketplace are not very robust and consistent in their end results. Basic visualization options with greater customizability (such as gauges and boxplots) are sorely missing in Looker, making some of the end dashboards look amateur by comparison.
One of the main challenges with Looker is the learning curve associated with LookML and the data modeling layer, which can require specialized skills and initial setup time. For companies without strong data engineering capabilities, this can slow down adoption. In addition, some of the dashboarding and visualization capabilities felt less flexible comapred to other BI tools, requiring more effort to achieve certain layouts or custom visualizaiton.
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Peer Discussions
Looker Reviews and Ratings
- Manager, StrategyGov't/PS/EdEducationReview Source
Grouping Capabilities Excel, While Table Merging and Date Fields Need Improvement
After spending a lot of time with Looker, I believe it's a very powerful and useful tool that lets me get most of the insights I need both operationally and strategically in a very simple way. - STAFF ANALYTICS ENGINEER50M-1B USDServices (non-Government)Review Source
LookML Supports Data Consistency While Visualization Choices Remain Restricted
It is a very solid tool, especially with the possibility of centralizing metadata and definitions with LookML, but the selection of visualizations available is very limited compared to similar tools from other vendors. - Data Analyst1B-10B USDRetailReview Source
Semantic Modeling Enables Consistency But Learning Curve Presents Challenges for Teams
The semantic modeling approach allows teams to define metrics consistently. I think that improves trust in the data. In addition, integration with modern cloud warehouses works well and performance is generally reliable. - LEAD DATA ENGINEER1B-10B USDMediaReview Source
A great solution to BI with a managed semantic layer but limited with visual customizations due to Grid-Based structure
Apart from several limitations, we find Looker to be a great product in terms of governance and ease of use. - Senior Analyst50M-1B USDHealthcare and BiotechReview Source
Looker Provides Broad Integration But Faces Challenges With Local Data Loading
Looker is a cloud first dashboarding and business intelligence tool provided by GCP or Google. It comes with a beginner-friendly drag-and-drop first principles interface. It also covers a wide breadth of integration with various datatypes, databases and sources for optimal analytical operations.