Looker is one of several leading business intelligence (BI tools) that can help your organization harness the power of your data and glean impactful insights that allow you to make the best decisions for your business.
Keep reading for a high-level overview of Looker’s key features, pros and cons of Looker versus competitors, and a list of tools and technologies that easily integrate with Looker to augment your reporting.
Overview of Looker
Looker is a powerful BI tool that can help a business develop insightful visualizations. Among other benefits, users can create interactive and dynamic dashboards, schedule and automate the distribution of reports, set custom parameters to receive alerts, and utilize embedded analytics.
Why Use Looker
If you’re looking for a single source of truth, customized visuals, collaborative dashboards, and top-of-the-line customer support, Looker might be the best BI platform for you. Being fully browser-based cuts down on confusion as your team gets going, and customized pricing means you get exactly what you need.
Pros of Looker
- Looker offers performant and scalable analytics on a near-real-time basis.
- Because you need to define logic before creating visuals, it enforces a single-source-of-truth semantic layer.
- Looker is completely browser-based, eliminating the need for desktop software.
- It facilitates dashboard collaboration, allowing parallel development and publishing with out-of-the-box git integration.
Cons of Looker
- Looker can be more expensive than competitors like Microsoft Power BI; so while adding Looker to an existing BI ecosystem can be beneficial, you will need to take costs into consideration.
- Compared to Tableau, visuals aren’t as elegant and the platform isn’t as intuitive.
- Coding in LookML is unavoidable, which may present a roadblock for report developers who have minimal experience with SQL.
Select Complementary Tools and Technologies for Looker
- Any SQL database
- Amazon Redshift
- AWS
- Azure
- Fivetran
- Google Cloud
- Snowflake
Was this high-level overview of Looker helpful? If you’d like to learn more about Looker reporting or discuss how other leading BI tools, like Tableau and Power BI, may best fit your organization, contact us to learn more.
The content of this blog is an excerpt of our Business Intelligence Tool Comparison Guide. Click here to download a copy of the guide.
