Looker

What differentiates Looker from other similar products?

Looker is a BI application with an analytics-oriented application server that sits on top of relational data stores. It includes an end-user interface for exploring data, a reusable development paradigm for data discovery, and an API for supporting data in other systems.

What is your favorite aspect of this product?

Provides interesting data, provided the databases exist for it to be sliced. Delivery system is relatively easy to use. Customers can pick up the report creation pretty quickly.

What do you dislike most about this product?

API is difficult to use, especially with auth problems. LookMLs can be confusing with referenced objects. Maintaining on-prem servers requires a lot of maintenance. In the cloud the data writes slowly.

What recommendations would you give to someone considering this product?

For less evolved reporting, it is not bad at all. It is not designed to scale, fully. I mean that as long as you do not intend to scale, it is a good product for your company. Log aggregation level reporting is not suited for Looker.

What differentiates Looker from other similar products?

Looker is different from Mode or Tableau in its plug-and-play simplicity of use for non-technical team members. Once fields and dimensions are set up, users don't need knowledge of SQL to research, analyze, plan, and predict using their organization's powerful data. For those who want to take it a step further, developing is straightforward, making it a great product for those with career growth aspirations in analytics without as much experience needed.

What is your favorite aspect of this product?

I love how accessible everything is. Anyone on the team can answer basically any question with a quick query.

What do you dislike most about this product?

People who are more experienced with SQL may find other options, such as Mode, simpler to query. If an organization uses Looker along with another product, there is risk of an information bottleneck. It's important that more advanced data analysts spend time with the product to ensure that ease and access of data breaks down information barriers between departments and team members of different skill levels.

What recommendations would you give to someone considering this product?

Make sure someone in the organization identified to take the time to understand and develop Looker, and someone will be available to continuously reevaluate tables and joins as your product grows. Support is extremely helpful, but an internal champion or two will ensure that everyone is up and running and has access to everything they need all the time.

What differentiates Looker from other similar products?

Easy to use and intuitive UI. The ability to create dashboards and customise them however you feel makes it a perfect tool for sales, finance, product, accounts and C-suite

What is your favorite aspect of this product?

The power to harness everything we have in our database to make quick to market decisions without relying on development resources.

What do you dislike most about this product?

Not much I do not like about this product, pulling huge data dumps has slow load times but that's not necessarily Looker's fault. I do think the dashboard customisations could be better.

What recommendations would you give to someone considering this product?

I'd recommend just going all in on this product, i have used many data visualisation tools in the past and this does the job and more.