Looker for Business Intelligence (2024)

FAQs

What is Looker business intelligence? ›

Google's Looker is a cloud-based Business Intelligence tool that helps you explore, share, and visualize data that drive better business decisions. Looker is a platform that allows you to create and share reports quickly and smartly.

Looker's platform works with transactional databases like Oracle and MySQL as well as analytical datastores like BigQuery, Snowflake, Redshift, and more. Looker lets you create consistent data models on top of all your data with speed and accuracy.

Looker is best suited for businesses that require complex data modeling, customization of reports, and real-time insights into their data. It works well for organizations dealing with large volumes of data from multiple sources who need a flexible tool to analyze and visualize their information effectively.

Two such innovations, Looker Duet AI, are at the forefront of this revolution, each bringing unique capabilities that, when combined, create a powerful synergy that can redefine how businesses interact with and extract value from their data.

Looker Limitations:

Limited visualization. Steep learning curve. LookML is not easy to learn.

Is Tableau or Looker better? Choosing between Tableau and Looker depends on your specific business and data needs. If you require a tool with deep customization, complex data modeling, and integration with Google Cloud, Looker is a great choice.

Looker pricing varies based on the number of connected data sources, users, and its scale of deployment. But, the technology doesn't come cheap. Most outlets report that the price for a Looker subscription starts around $35,000 a year and can easily go higher, depending on an organization's particular needs.

Looker can be challenging to learn on your own without guidance from an experienced trainer.

Looker allows you to provide insights at the right time and place through proactive alerts and deep integrations.

Advantages: Looker Studio is free to use, making it attractive for organizations with fewer requirements for governance or advanced analyses. Good integration with Google products such as Sheets, Analytics, Bigquery, and Ads. Easy to use for both analysts and end-users.

Can I use Looker for free? ›

Looker Studio is available at no charge for creators and report viewers.

You don't have to be a SQL expert, and even beginners can create powerful Looker models. But, in general, the deeper you go in LookML, the more you benefit from a deeper knowledge of SQL.

Looker supports up to 5,000 rows and 200 columns for pivoted or unpivoted query results. For browser performance, 50 or fewer columns is recommended. Looker sets a default column limit of 50 columns for pivoted query results.

Google recently acquired Looker, a Santa Cruz-based data analytics startup, for a whopping $2.6 billion. The all-cash deal was the fourth-biggest in Google's history and this has helped Google Cloud close the gap in the cloud space market against Amazon (Amazon Web Services) and Microsoft (Azure).

Some of the companies that use Looker include Wayfair, Afterpay, Deliveroo, Angi, Coinbase, Careers at Tide, TransferWise, Fivetran, Peloton, Glovo and many more. You can find a complete list of 19,266 companies that use Looker on TheirStack.com.

GA4 tracks website and app performance with detailed reports, while Looker Studio excels in data visualization, allowing for engaging, interactive dashboards. Together, these tools offer comprehensive insights: GA4 provides the raw data, and Looker Studio transforms it into visually appealing reports.

Overall, Looker wins on broad analytics features. But for those needing stronger data warehousing and data management tools, Snowflake excels.

Google's BigQuery is part of the Google Cloud Platform, a database-as-a-service (DBaaS) supporting the querying and rapid analysis of enterprise data. Looker Studio is a data visualization platform that transforms data into meaningful presentations and dashboards with customized reporting tools.

The API can be used as a part of many use cases. Some examples include internal operational tools, highly custom customer-facing embedded analytics, mobile app integrations, specialized Looker administrative tools, and more.