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.

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.

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 is currently the best data visualization tool out there for those that are on a budget. That is because Looker is free to use.

While Looker is relatively easy to use for those who have a data analytics background. I do think that Looker could be easier and more intuitive to set up. Especially setting up data sources can be tricky.

Looker has a very professional and easy interface to access and the ability to manage multiple marketing channels through Looker functions is excellent.
This platform reporting capability is on top and incredible leads management software and very easy to integrate to other platforms.

I have nothing to underline as a problem from the Looker functionalities, and the training when new to the tool is effective.

Looker has allowed my company to organized and dig deeper into data that we collect in our CRM. You can really get down to the specific details of things. I like that you can easily create a look whenever needed and have the option to not save it if it's not needed again. I also like LookerBot for Slack.

It definitely has a bit of a learning curve. I still struggle with creating some reports but as someone who is not data-centric I've learned how to use it pretty well

Departments can access data in a consumable form without complexity.
Some SQL skills help achieve a lot more with the software, you can write your own queries and get more drilled down data.

Some visualisation options (like graphs & charts) were a bit more complex to achieve. Although, the default tables are simple and easy to understand.

I liked this software a lot, it has the nice analytics and stats for our ecommerce business and it's the one we used a lot. It's also for our affiliate tracking we used to measure the performance at all.

It's the complete tool to start with, we been using this for last 2 years now and our team and I liked it.

Easy to use product. You can create dashboard. Take a look at datas and do deep dives. It helps business a lot.

It would be great if it were faster than it is now. Especially on Mondays you need more time to get what you want.

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.

The looker team has great customer service. They are flexible and easy to reach. The chat feature in the product is awesome, as it quickly connects you to a Customer Success rep who can help you with pretty much anything!

The cost for this product is quite high compared to other BI tools. Also, this product requires a full time data engineer to keep the backend of the product to build new data models.

Even non technical people, get excited to use this product once they know how!
Customization ability
Incredible data visualizations
Allows me to automate and optimize processes
The friendliest and most helpful customer service

Loading dashboards can be very slow
Validating code can sometimes take forever
Occasional bugs make it temporarily go down for the entire company

Logging in the first time is simple and straightforward. I also had good experiences with chat support to solve small access and navigation issues.

Looker tables are not easy to dive into. I found them more helpful for high level information and trend identification. Without a team of Data Engineers or Analysts, Looker is a fairly static tool with some canned reports.

They are always improving the product and taking my requests seriously. I have been using it for 2 years, and all of my requests have been met.

Sometimes the requests take time, and with all the software updates, sometimes the documentation is a little lacking, but support is always there to help.

I use Looker for two reasons. 1) to see my sales statistics and 2) to pull lists of subscriber data. Looker truly helps you to understand your data better than other tools.

I've had a steep learning curve with this tool. There's not a lot of formal training opportunities or help documentation.

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.

The best part about Looker is that users can build their own reports and dashboards with the data that is available

It is difficult for people to fully utilize the features available without fully understanding the data. This often ends up with most people at the company not using Looker to the fullest.

The ability to create easily digestible visualizations in a matter of seconds. Looker has brought together all of our different data sources in one hub to read and analyze and present data.

It requires an admin to make it usable for a wider audience. It is not out of the box accessible for someone who isn't familiar with the data setup