Looker Reviews

The software makes it simple to pull reports. The labels are clear so whatever you need to look data on can be found easily. The software integrated into our system and which allows us to pull data on info less than a day from being done.

The software can crash if a lot of reports are being run at the same time. Otherwise, it can go slow too, so quarterly/monthly reports your whole team is doing can cause the software to run slow.

The software makes it easy for those who are not data analyst to use. After an hour training session and spending time trying looker out, I was able to learn it and see the full potential the software offers.

Being able to test and see if initiatives are effective. Also, it always us to show and present customers data that can help their business with data-driven proof.

Without Looker, we would be unable to efficiently analyze our core business metrics. When digging into retention and sales metrics Looker allows a general user the easy ability to visualize their own metrics. It also gives the developer level capabilities to run SQL queries and more in-depth data queries. It's great that you can also do calculations much like you could in excel without having to have programming chops.

The visualization tactics are fairly limited. It would be great to have some more options for charts.

It is good for all levels of experience with BI and data analysis tools. If you want something meat and potatoes, Looker is for you. If you want something that is going to be less robust but prettier it may be better to look into other products or tools.

We needed to figure out how to consolidate our data analysis across sales, services, and marketing. Looker was key in uniting that data and then it allows us to do analysis across our different departments. This means that we can see how marketing is impacting sales, how different types of sales or discounts impact things like revenue and customer retention.

Looker has nice visualization features and tools. We can connect Looker to wide array of data and sources to make several department more efficient with quick access to relevant data. We can quickly find, filter and sort data to work with it more efficiently. The overall user interface is clean and allows us to navigate and use different sections in a simple and smooth manner. The process of saving data is done with minimal steps.

We can filter data in the most precise ways. The pricing is probably expensive for many smaller organizations. Customizing certain features can be complicated without a thorough understanding of the software.

For organizations that deal with large amounts of data across different departments, Looker can be a very effective way to manage accessibility to the data and to leverage it for sales and other revenue generating opportunities. It can also be useful for reports and market data analysis.

Looker is used by many departments in our company as a central hub for business data. We are all able to access data in a smooth and up-to-date manner for various uses, including sales, marketing, research and design. It's a great way for everyone to leverage data and optimize client and lead experiences. We can use data from Looker for detailed analysis and reports with engaging visualization options.

I like the fact that i can create almost any form of presentation of the data accessible to the application, and share it with anyone set up as a user in my company. They, likewise, can do the same. I like the fact that I can explore new data slicing and presentation options as new needs and ideas present themselves. It is easy to use once you get over the initial steep learning curve, and terminology barrier (see "dislikes"). I also like the fact that once I set up a report I don't have to keep updating it to get current data (assuming I've set it up properly!)

I don't like the fact that they have use their own terminology for to many things, such as "Looks" and "Spaces" that users have to learn, and providing additional motivation to reluctant users for resisting adoption. That, on top of the fact it is fairly complex and has a fairly steep learning curve. That said, once you get it, though, its really easy to use.

Our implementation is via Salesfusion, our MA platform, and is paid for through that subscription. The biggest thing to watch for in my opinion is getting the right custom fields implemented from your data source platform. I don't know whether it is a limitation of Salesfusion or Looker, but we were only able to get a portion of the custom fields that we need implemented in this platform. As you know, your analysis is only as good as the available data, and if you don't have access to all of it, you get an incomplete picture. Also, setup is very complex and tedious. Although I didn't have to do it - Salesfusion did - it was clear that it was a long, complex process. It took about 3 months to get our instance up and running.

Several:

1. Presenting localized sales lead data to distributed sales managers that allow then to quickly view and act on their regional lead activity

2. See basic marketing stats more easily

3. Set up my own customized marketing reports as needed

4. Make both marketing and sales lead information more widely available to help enable better marketing and sales decision making

It allows us to consolidate all of our metric definitions in one place so everyone's working off the same set of numbers. It's infinitely flexible and has helped us solve complex data issues in a way that's scalable for the entire organization.

Ultimately, it's user-friendly enough that we've been able to democratize our data for the entire organization - it solves the needs of everyone from those working with BI software for the first time, to our most advanced power users.

Less an overt dislike but it's important to know there's a lot of work required to build out the data layer to a point where it's usable for the entire organization. Bring it on when you have someone who's expert-level in SQL, and who can dedicate to it ~full time as there is a lot of customization needed to build it out correctly, and continue to update and improve it for new use cases.

As long as you have the technical resources internally to build out and maintain Looker correctly, it's a fantastic tool.

Enabling every person in the organization access to the data that drives our business...not just those expert-level data fluency.

Automating every scorecard/dashboard in the company according to the KPIs that drive each team, and the business as a whole.

Deep dives into customers, acquisition sources, LTVs, etc. etc. to understand and monitor what's working, or not.

Forecasting and modelling to understand upcoming inventory and operation needs..

Uploading, tracking, and managing the business vs. operating plans in real-time.

I like the way that I can make practically any type of introduction of the information available to the application, and offer it with anybody set up as a client in my organization. They, in like manner, can do likewise. I like the way that I can investigate new information cutting and introduction alternatives as new needs and thoughts present themselves. It is anything but difficult to utilize once you get over the underlying steep expectation to absorb information, and phrasing hindrance (see "despises"). I additionally like the way that once I set up a report I don't need to continue refreshing it to get present information (accepting I've set it up legitimately!)

I personally haven't found much to dislike with Looker. My only complaint is the time it takes to run some reports, but it's my understanding this is being addressed with newer versions.

Put resources into preparing super clients inside each order. We representatives who were exceptionally talented with showcasing, tasks, promoting and building. Every workforce will have novel needs, so putting resources into a couple of masters will enable every division to benefit as much as possible from the apparatus.

Looker has helped us dispose of the information breadline and offer information to the clients when they need and how they need it without depending on somebody to hand it to them. It's likewise enabled us to spread information and information utilization to something beyond a bunch of clients, spreading it at organization level so everybody can get experiences out of their information.

Looker enables you to get going rapidly with it's prototyping ability and LookML usefulness. It makes it simple for our endeavor information group to get information before the client rapidly while then going in the background and adding it to our information warehouse.The models, investigates and looks are anything but difficult to explore once all set up. The SQL sprinter is an extraordinary element that assists with questioning the informational indexes that are accessible before making a plunge and making investigates. Dash-boarding and sharing reports are additionally extremely simple with Looker. It makes expanding information perceivability in the association extremely simple.

Security layer was somewhat perplexing. I think this because of the adaptability that they were attempting to incorporate with it.

Give colleagues appropriate preparing when you begin utilizing it as this will have an extraordinary long haul sway on the organization and ought to diminish the weight on the information science group.

Our organization was attempting to locate an incredible adaptable arrangement which could enable our workers to improve their way to deal with leading deals process, just as promoting by and large. Because of Looker, our organization has figured out how to increase our transformation rate, just as improve our profitability level and examination capacities.

Ease of use and amazing customer support are by far their best selling features. As a developer it's invaluable to have someone right away to help you with your problem, saving a lot of time and patience. As an end user, the navigating and use experience is really important on determining the level of trust in the data and the tool, and second, the likelyhood that they're going to continue trying to get insights from data. The platform used is very important and Looker achieves that successfully!

There isn't much I dislike, but some very minor inconveniences such as browsing between the documentation platform and the forums.

Looker has helped us get rid of the data breadline and give data to the users when they want and how they want it without relying on someone to hand it to them. It's also allowed us to spread data and data usage to more than just a handful of users, spreading it at company level so everyone can get insights out of their data.

I like the ease of use and the ability to share saved looks among coworkers.

I feel like custom dashboards are a missing element from the generic product offering. I would like to set up a page for every department leader that shows them relevant up-to-date information. There is an option to do this but it is far too complicated. When I reached out to looker for help I was surprised that they wanted to charge me so much to have someone help me set up these dashboards.

I'd recommend having one single employee spend the time and energy necessary to really understand the product and all of it's capabilities. I think we use looker for about 50-70% of it's capabilities. Since it is no longer one individual persons job, we often don't have the time to learn about further capabilities.

We use looker generally to access information for nearly all departments. KPI tracking, customer performance, sales and marketing effectiveness, detecting issues, and running reports.

Looker makes accessing customer and transactional data easy. From developing dashboards, charts and bespoke "Looks", our Marketing team were able to leverage insights about our customers, their purchasing history and trends with far greater easy than using BigQuery alone. Looker helped inform strategic decisions and business direction far more than we would have expected.

The ease at which a business user can navigate Looker is dependent on how well it has been set up by a technical expert. To add new dimensions or measures, or modify the way in which data is grouped, you will need to have technical support, which is often now always available.

Invest in training super users within each discipline. We employees who were highly skilled with marketing, operations, merchandising and engineering. Each faculty will have unique needs, so investing in a few specialists will help each department make the most of the tool.

Looker has helped us accurately report on current and historical sales performance, across multiple dimensions. We've been able to streamline our reporting processes. Specifically for marketing, we've gained a better understanding of our Customer LTV and identification of opportunity customer segments, as well as evaluate our highest performing acquisition channels. We also gained abetter understanding of the products customers were purchasing, which is a challenging task given we have a customisable product.

I like how Looker challenges me to push for more, dive deeper into the data and how easy to use it is. I really believe this is an amazing tool for data analytics and if you use it in a smart way it can help you improve your performance and business.

I don't like that sometimes there aren't enough variables to add to some looks and you have to request it to be done. I believe it would be more useful for the user to be able to implement any variable he wants.

Explore for yourself and never stop trying and learning. Looker is a great place to learn about every aspect of your business and space where you can improve your analytic skills.

I'm doing data analysis and it's helping me to perform better at my job. I've realised that looker has given me the tool to explore for myself and learn a lot, by making mistakes but making rights too.

I like the ability to look deeper into our sales and understand some of our key metrics that we're always tracking. I also like the ability to look into specific funnels of the business as opposed to the overall number.

I wish the user interface was better. Sometimes it is difficult to create the exact view I want in order to see the correct info. Also, unless someone has prior knowledge of the software it is very difficult to just pick it up.

I would recommend looker for data tracking

Being able to understand some of our trackables better. Without looker we wouldnt be able to see that detailed view.

Looker's visuals seem to be designed almost as if Google had a drag and drop product for your central reporting needs. The visuals are clean, and it is very easy to plop a number of visual representations on top of a query.

Looker forces a company into two streams of thought: an analyst first culture and essentially married to Looker. Looker really thrives at young or small companies with no centralized reporting or analytics/data science teams. For the few people who know SQL, they can create these items called Dimensions and Measures which are essentially saved queries for qualitative and quantitative data. Instead of having someone write a query with many caveats in a where clause or in cast type conversions, these Dimensions and Measures are meant to save you the trouble of writing them and be ready to drag and drop into an editor for a quick dashboard.

Unfortunately, this only useful for companies just getting out the gates with their data. If you have a column such as customerId, you cannot write SQL in looker to get an aggregate count of customer id's. You need to create a new dimension for it, and have it uploaded. If you have a count of customerIds restricted by some WHERE clause, then you will need to upload that new value as well. All the new measures and dimensions that you need have to be uploaded, which means that you will be responsible for learning Looker's LookML to upload new datapoints.

As a company gets larger and as more departments are formed, your Looker repository will suffer from a lack of grooming. There will be a ton of dimensions and measures all over the place in different schemas and with different underlying queries that no one person will be able to explain. There will also be a massive amount of unused charts and visuals that were created ad-hoc and are relatively unused because they were spur-of-the-moment replacements for an Excel sheet.

This also means that much of your business logic and data governance resides within the tool. If you were to divorce yourself from Looker, it would be a very messy process. Troubleshooting queries is already a challenge because you must look at the underlying code for a dimension or measure. Real trouble starts when Looker creates its own material views, which creates another layer of abstraction that you must then troubleshoot.

This process of ad-hoc adding usable dimensions and measures in a tool through LookML and then troubleshooting the queries underneath the hood is not scaleable and no company with a centralized analytics function should allow it to happen.

Invest in a tool which can intake an actual query through a database connection, and keep those queries thoroughly managed and groomed in a version control system. Create a dashboard environment in which a core group of people build an ecosystem of dashboards for specific requests and educate people on how to read and interpret them.

Do not get into the business of enabling everyone in your company to have the ability to create their own ad-hoc visuals and set of dimensions and measures; you will truly regret the chaos that comes with it.

Consider if you want a playground for people to create whatever dimensions, measures, and views that they want, or if you choose to proceed with more governance in your BI decision.

Also note that you will have to learn LookML, which isn't difficult, but it's also like why? You are paying to have to learn a company's proprietary wrapper on SQL on top of hiring people proficient in SQL.

If you do purchase Looker, I would highly consider centralizing the function of people who will create visuals and make things to address specific requests, and limit the views that Looker creates.

Looker is used to provide visuals for YoY trends and to produce lists of customerIds that are passed from BI platforms to downstream tools such as CRM and advertising platforms in lieu of a query.

That Looker allows you build a modelling layer over the data. It provides reusable SQL and also helps t ensure correct models and altering on common join problems. It's easy to explore data through the dashboards and then drill down into the data performing custom analytics.

Visualisations can be a bit limited and the PDTs always require processing the whole data set. This can be slow for very large and complex queries. It is also a bit wasteful for datasets with small updates. Would be nice to be able to do batch processing.

It has made our data warehouse available to the majority of our employees. It's particularly good for empowering the business development and marketing teams, allows them to create their own explores. Additionally it's makes it reliable to validate the explores people are creating by the data analysis team.

I love that you really don't need to know SQL to become an analyst and ask the right questions in Looker. I've trained my whole CSX team to use the tool and it has super charged us as a team.

I hate how long it takes since it never really caches the data. I have to really make sure the queries I write or the questions I ask are very limited as a result.

Looker is constantly making updates, they ship very quickly. I have a positive outlook of this product.

I have a real pulse on my business now. I know things basically in real time, and the visualizations have gotten much better in the 3 years I have used it.

Looker has done a nice job in understanding a users desire to use measures and dimensions to tell a story. The quick and easy accessibility of the data elements that are point click build are intuitive and very user friendly. Additionally, the top to bottom Filters, Visualization and data elements keep all of the information front and center and logically ordered for a power user and also to facilitate a discussion with stakeholders

The visualizations are somewhat limited compared to it's population. I would like to have an easier pathway for creating more different types of visuals (nods, etc.)

Integration of Health & Welfare data sets to provide reporting to Payers and Administrators in the space. We looked to create an exploration experience for users to uncover insights within their data that may not be apparent from the top level.

-Looker has an extensive data modelling layer ( not to be confused with statistical modelling). This is a feature that makes it stand apart from other tools. With the help of PDTs, we implement a lot of data transformation which wouldn't be very efficient on just another BI tool.

-With just a few lines of LookML code, you can join different data from source tables and view these fields in one place to be able to build Looks on it, without writing long lines of sql.

-Once you build a Look (one report) with drag/drop and filters, it is easy to to visualize data, add calculation fields, etc.

-When you run an individual look, you can see the underlying SQL generated and you can easily figure out if the report is doing exactly what you need it to

-Admin features like content validator let you check if changing views/dimensions/measures at one place is affecting anything else the rest of you ecosystem.

-Prompt Customer Support

-Slow learning curve - The terminologies like Looks, Explore, Model etc, as well as the site navigation for these is not very intuitive to a first time user, even thought he/she might be experienced in other BI tools. LookML might also seem non-intuitive at first, but is easy to learn and very useful.

-Data Visualization options are plenty, but not as great as other tools.

-Some complicated Looks tend to load very slowly, even though the actual query would have run pretty fast. Affects load time in Dashboards as well API

- Can be time consuming for exploratory analysis - but best once you know exactly what to implement.

If you need some tool to provide reports to a large amount of audience, make it self serve to an extent and have a strong team to manage it, you can go for it.

We have been able to implement a whole lot of our reporting requirements in Looker. Some of the savvy sales or higher management are able to gather simple insights from the UI by themselves. Daily/monthly tracking happens through dashboards in mails or UI.

I love how intuitive looker is as it means I can generally be more independent and it reduces the pressure on our data team.

I'm generally pretty happy with Looker - I think the only thing from my perspective that I would change would be the price as it would free up budget for other areas of the company.

Give team members proper training when you start using it as this will have a great long-term impact on the company and should relieve the stress on the data science team.

I use Looker to analyse the impact of our CRM campaigns. This generally involves analysing CTR, LTV, revenue, impressions etc. It allows us to target users in a more intelligent manner based on these insights.

Looker absolutely has the best people and technology in this industry. I was absolutely blown away by the quality of the support that they're able to provide, and with incredible speed. This is a company that really cares about its people and its customers; it's clear that they invest in both.

Within our proof of concept, Looker was able to form a genuine partnership, making solid recommendations that will yield rapid results.

On top of that, Looker has granular permissions, robust administration tools that allow for setting permissions by group or individual, and the ability to design what end-users can or cannot change within their environment.

Finally, Looker has a public help-center that has a wealth of excellent information, both written and on video. Don't overlook this, or you'll sell yourself short.

Unfortunately, Looker isn't free. While there is a need to learn a new language, the language is intuitive and relatively fast to learn if you're relatively experienced with SQL.

Compare Looker to other products in the same space simultaneously. For us, Looker was the clear winner.

- Health scores are becoming a reality

- Cohort analysis is starting to take shape

- Detailed analysis of a huge dataset

- Streamlining internal processes to ensure we are able to service more customers in a shorter timeframe, and with greater quality.

- Visualizations and the ability to embed those views and visualizations into a view that our customers could use.

I love the fact that our many different departments and people of different skill levels are able to investigate and explore our data without having to actively interact with an analyst. Also, the ability to create a single dashboard to be usable for multiple different people's individual information using user attributes saves me so much time!

I struggle with looker's slowness. We've noticed that at high login times, it can take up to 5 minutes just to load an explore or dashboard, not including running. If we could find a way to be able to allow people to not deal with that, it would be awesome!

Everything from Sales Operations to Product Optimization to Finance Spend. Being able to have all of our data on a single host is a huge advantage to cross-team communication.

We use Looker both as an internal tool and customer facing. I'm in sales and an end user of the platform and cannot do my job without this tool. I specifically love the way we have this connected to Salesforce to be able to understand my pipeline in a single click.

It can be tough for non techincal folks to pick up on, but I honestly don't know of a tool like this that would be easy for them to use. It can be slow at times but that may be an issue with the way we have organized our data set.

1. Customer Reporting - we use Looker to be our customer facing reporting tool.

Looker is a frictionless experience for end user's of varying technical background. In a very short time the user can be fully up to speed and gathering data, pulling reports for their various projects. There are many times that we've been able to use Looker to actively reinforce and validate an assumption a member of our team has had without calling upon anyone within our Data team to facilitate the discussion. Looker was easily accessed for the information.

It is hard for me to say. I know a lot of what I experience is going to be due to configuration and not necessarily a result of the product itself. That said, one thing I'm curious about would be the ability to access realtime data and see a query automatically update within a given dashboard. I feel as though this, as well, is going to be more of a configuration piece as opposed to a 'tool' specific dislike.

Right now our primary usage is going to be within the area of Business Intelligence and discovery. Through the usage in this way, we've been able to discover trends, research issues, and further validate assumptions that began to form.

Looker has allowed the entire team to be more data driven while no longer needing to directly rely on and take the time of those that are the 'keepers' of the data. We are now all able to intelligently make decisions based on data gleaned on an 'on demand' basis.

Looker's made it easy for our entire team to stay up-to-date on our most KPIs. It's charting software allows us to visualize data in many different ways and assemble dashboards that fill us in on what we need to know immediately.

It takes a bit of time to get up and running with Looker and LookML--it might require one or two members of your team to dedicate a significant amount of time to learn how to use Looker and own creating dashboards.

For a starter solution, Chart.io is pretty good. You will likely hit a point where it doesn't solve all your needs, though.

Before Looker, very few of our team members had access to how we were performing against KPIs and those folks would always be battered with questions around how the product was doing. Now, anyone can hop into Looker and answer those questions themselves, saving time and spreading insight.

Our company previous used Tableau. Looker is a much more user-focused and friendly platform.

We find it allows users to self-serve, dig into datasets and "discover" trends within data a lot more easily.

There are frequent updates / releases which capture feedback from a multitude of companies.

Some functions within Looker are quite rigid and require extra dimensioning / manipulation (e.g. chart series ordering).

Looker help personell seem to heavily rely on community documentation for reference.

Data discovery and analysis across our whole business.

As Looker is intuitive, users are able to answer their own questions (self-serve) and "discover" trends relatively easily.

Users are able to schedule customised reports (this is used heavily).

- Lots of cool visualizations like sankey and box plots in addition to the standard stuff

- I like that you can take a look created by someone an modify it to meet you own needs

- Ability to manage my data needs using the personal space

- Dashboard creation tools

- Not the most intuitive tool to pick up. I used mixed panel and google analytics before & there was a learning curve with this one in comparison!

- Sometimes the looks are slow to load.

- Not sure if this is a looker thing or the way we have implemented things but there are so many tables & its hard to know which table to start with for the data Im looking for

-Calculation field is useful but not intuitive!

Make product decisions based on data

See user behavior patterns

I like that I can see the LookML for all measures as this allows me to verify that they care calculating things correctly. Many of our operating procedures are esoteric and it's helpful for me to be able to make sure that we are accurately representing the metrics.

Some navigational quirks that I haven't fully worked out. Example: Sometimes I'll be working in a Look and then realize that I want to save it but don't want to overwrite the existing Look, and I'm either not able to or have not yet figured out how to "Save As" in that scenario to save the modified Look as a new Look altogether.

Democratization of data. Even those that do not know SQL and other more advanced data science skills can put together simple to complex reports. Also, used for tracking business progress against KPI's for executive team.

Looker offers a wide range of attractive as well as useful visualisations, without compromising on performance at the same time. Most other similar tools focus on just one and lose out on the other.

While Looker offers the capability to work with multiple data sources, this isn't capitalised to its full extent. Adding new data sources to Looker can be a very cumbersome process - it has lots of points of failure. This needs to be made simpler.

If you need to simplify the process of self-serviced analytics and require wide range of visualisation options, go for Looker. These are areas where Looker is probably the best tool available.

Looker plays a vital role in the reporting infrastructure. To some extent, it acts as a bridge between data and insights - and it does a brilliant job of it too!

The flexibility of looker was a game changer in our company. Because we were able to define our own fields, variables and measures, we are now able to make sure the reports our end-users are looking at are accurate.

Not much to dislike. One of the thing that is sometime irritating (but in a good way) is that new features are coming out that render our old work useless as they replace some of the more custom wor we use to do (ex: merged results instead of doing PDT)

We are trying to have one source of truth for all our data, from marketing to sales, to finances. Also being able to join data together for powerful analyses was one of the goal of Looker implementation

Looker provides the way for companies with large data sets coming to be able to bring all the data to the employees to better understand the customer experience. For most companies every aspect of the company can benefit from insight into the data, but the data resources (data analysts) are not wide spread enough to be able to provide all of the analytical requests for all of the departments. Looker allows the entire company to be able to utilize the data platforms we have without a strain on the data analyst resources.

There are some limited functionality when it comes to the direct sql manipulation in the backend in conjunction with the sql derived tables. I would like more insight into all of the functionalities and how sql can be more easily manipulated for as much specificity as possible.

Funnel analysis, and retention are the main areas in which we can gain insights through looker

Looker's UI is very simple and easy to use. Looker also has a lot of great documentation online which makes it simple to throw together LookML (view and model) and then build out the visualizations and plop them onto a dashboard. I've held Looker training sessions for my coworkers and most of my training materials were created from Looker's training materials; they're super easy to understand because the underlying product itself is simple to use.

I think the only bad part for me is the multiple Explores that our team has built, and not knowing which one people are still using and which ones are obsolete and therefore sometimes we have multiple views for similar things. Another dislike is probably is a very specific use case; it's hard to build out an all-comprehensive explore that can answer all KPI related questions from the company. It seems most explores are very specific to teams and therefore new users sometimes get confused where to start looking and how to go about finding the answers to their questions.

Our company is using Looker as a self-service reporting and dashboarding tool. This has already been achieved and most users at the company love to use Lookers. People that are willing to let go of using Excel have found Looker's table calculations to be super helpful.

After some initial setup, looker allows you to very quickly model any metrics / data relevant to your business. We use it to keep up to date information about engagement and usage of all parts our SaaS application. The visual graphs and displays are easy to setup and modify.

For simple use cases, I wish Looker would auto-generate the schema for the user to make setup even easier.

Looker allows us to have transparency into our product's usage and performance. It also allows engineers to build out the visual language the business users can use themselves to answer questions.

Looker is a very powerful tool. They have a clean UI and tons of functionality. I really like the reports and dashboards that you can set up with looker. We use looker to run reports for everything, sales, account management, users, engineering, etc so it can be used in all areas of the business.

This may be just because of training or because I don't use the system enough but there is so much in there it can be difficult to get the exact report you are looking to pull. It's like a huge spreadhseet on steroids so if you're not using it daily it can take some time to get the data you need exact.

seems to have all of the functionalities needed.

Dashboards

Tracking

Reporting

Insights

Sales Dashboards

Customer Success Dashboards

Customer Reports

Marketing

I absolutely love Looker's customer support. I a a lookml developer, and Looker has chat support from 9-6. This has saved my day on many occasions, and one of the main reasons I will always recommend looker. I also love the flexibility of the tool, and the ability to use the tool for both operations and executive dashboard. Looker is usable for operations because it gives the option of digging in to the granular data

There is not much I dislike. There is always room for improvement with this tool tho. Organization around charts/dashboard, as well as better organization around fields that are usable to explore

Allowing every team (product, growth, operations) to analyze their own data without a data analyst running queries for them. We also have high level dashboard that exec team needs. We even use this for financial reporting on a high level

The flexibility and capability is top notch. Looker is really quick to innovate and add new features. We love that the entire of basis of Looker is about querying your database in real-time. With this, there's a lot of transparency into why a query isn't running or why results aren't as expected.

The support team is great about referring you to the right documentation (which can be hard to find), but they're not as great about coming up with creative solutions to unique problems. Oftentimes it will result in a mention to the product team. More visibility into the feature roadmap would go a long way.

It isn't the most intuitive of the BI tools, but if you have someone that can dedicate some part time energy towards maintaining and troubleshooting, then the capabilities are superior to most anything out there.

The main business goal of looker has been making data more accessible for the data team and business users. The obvious benefit has been less reliance on the senior data analysts.

Looker levels the playing field between techy folks that no SQL and business folks that understand business outcomes and want to drive data-driven decisions. It's easy to use and enables business users to find outliers and make decisions quickly.

I also appreciate the pro-activeness of the customer success team and sales engineering that has really showcased the value of the product and answer questions quickly.

I don't have anything negative to say at this point.

overall, our business is growing at rapid pace and want to be able to steer the company in the right direction. We have multiple projects ready to be deployed across the business functions, but we are starting with the top 10 metrics that drive our business around financials and product usage, and then our focus will be on top line and bottom line finance metrics, platform usage, and sales and marketing funnels.

Really easy to create models and quickly deploy changes for database tables.

Possible to add custom business calculations as well

Visualisations are slightly tricky to implement if the user is just savvy with tables and pie charts (i.e. heavy spreadsheet user). There should be a way to hint the user for possible viz on the data they are exploring

If you know your data structure and the end goal to what your consumers are after, this is a powerful tool

1) Detailed data drill downs on platform debugging

2) Business needs to monitor product performance and user-journeys

Single source of truth for dimensions and measures via LookML. Easy, intuitive UI for end users to explore data and author their own reports (Looks). High performant when leveraging a speedy cloud based DB platform.

Limited flexibility in Layout and Design of Looks and Dashboards means little customization is possible.

If your data isn't in a good place/platform, don't expect great performance from Looker, as it is simply executing SQL directly against the database.

Eliminate the need for SSAS cubes, and retire legacy reporting tools while taking advantage of cloud based BI platform. We are in the process of retiring said cubes, and migrating our data to cloud based DB (Snowflake), and are seeing huge performance gains from the Looker/Snowflake combo. Development time has also been reduced relative to our existing tools and we can always start and build from the same data source.

Looker is THE tool for business that are passed Stage 2 in Business Intelligence (meaning past dashboarding prepared by the only BI person where no exploration is possible). Data exploration experience is made (almost) dead easy. Dashboarding is even easier and the UI is just close to perfect.

Also the scheduling is an amazing feature that combined with other platforms like Zapier, Slack, MailChimp, Google Sheet, etc. opens up a whole new level of BI possibilities!

Space Management is maybe not quite optimal. It would be great to restrict access to spaces (not only user spaces).

If you have an inhouse Data geek person that knows how to deal with Redshift (or an engineer that can help with that) then you're all set! Looker is that easy to setup and maintain.

We wanted to find a tool that would enable us to easily explore data (meaning so that a non-technical person could drill into data without having another person running the reports), easily build dashboards and schedule reports by email.

Looker answered all those requirements.

I like how quickly it is to share data and information with someone across our company, especially in a visual way to aid in understanding.

With Looker, there is a lot that you can do ... and some things that you can't do. The things that you can't do are frustrating and sometimes surprising. There are at times workarounds, and other times there are not.

Looker is not great for stand-alone graphics, which is a limitation. It is also still cumbersome for an average employee to navigate Looker without help from someone well versed in Looker. Nonetheless, I've been surprised at how quickly adoption throughout the org and Looker truly as "the source of truth" is available.

Looker has limitations, but as long as it solves the main problem you are looking for, it's great. I would highly recommend it and really value the discourse community, support, and consistent monthly releases which have a lot of updates and improvements

We use Looker for internal business analytics. It sits on top of Redshift, which is where we store both production data as well as data from other tools (e.g. Salesforce, Segment, Desk), which is then combined in Looker.

Looker is typically used for our business KPIs

Ease of development. Because Looker is based on SQL, it's easy for us to model new data sources quickly. As a startup, our application data models change frequently, and it's easy for our team to adapt.

Some end-users struggle to use the tool. However, Looker has steadily been releasing features that make it more user-friendly.

Get someone with Looker experience to do your initial data modeling.

Providing easy access to data.

One benefit I didn't foresee going in is the new API. It's meant that for many cases, we can centralize data munging. For example - building predictive models often requires a lot of data manipulation to create features. With the API, we can do the data manipulation just once in Looker, and hit the API for datasets for our models (previously, we would have had to reproduce the data manipulation in Python). We can then display the outputs of the predictive models in Looker, right next to the underlying features.

On Looker, we can make views that have many tables pre-joined. This makes exploring data way easier for users who aren't comfortable in SQL, making joins. It's also easier for our power users to do data pulls quickly.

1. The platform is not as flexible as SQL. There isn't a good way to do inner queries or case statements. You can't sort things by calculated fields when there are limits.

2. Exploring isn't that easy. It has a substantial learning curve and there are not as many UI options as Tableau has.

3. Looker is not pretty. Tableau makes much prettier charts.

Looker requires a lot of upfront work but is worth it for data-driven companies. Teach everyone in your company how to explore right away.

Before we used Looker, very few people in the company had access to the data. Now over 80% of our company uses Looker for reporting, and many people are able to explore their own data.

As a sales user of any BI tool, what matters most is being able to access the basics, generate a "look" or report and then work with the data team to enhance and iterate.

Again, as a sales user, I need help from other teams to get the most out of the tool when I want to extract what I want to extract from the warehouse.

Creating a killer dashboard requires assistance too.

Create standard reports for a broad set of users in the org before you roll it out to the org. Ensure that there is a central team who owns enabling other teams to get the most out of the investment.

Visibility. Needing to surface everything from user data, to performance data, and a laundry list of others, Looker delivers on giving people, across different teams, and different applications, the access to the data they need to do their job and do it better than before.

The filtering options are very nice & allow you to drill down narrowly to pull data. Visualizations are also pretty slick & there is a lot of customization available to make it represent your data best.

I get a bit hung up on some data points being available in certain tables & not in others. Can make it a challenge to figure out where to start a new look if not using one that's already saved.

Do you have someone available to build the tables appropriately and troubleshoot as needed?

I mostly use Looker for performance analysis of our emails or our inventory. It's extremely helpful to give data points that prove / disprove theories we test in our email channel.

Making custom visualizations is super fun! I also really enjoy Lookml. I'm a developer by heart so it's 100% my focus, and if the code is fun then the product is fun.

Too much HTML and CSS sanitization! I had to jump through a lot of hoops in order to accomplish some of the requirements I had for an explore.

If you really want a product that is easy to use for a BI solution then looker is probably one of your best bets. It's super simple to set up, and anybody with development experience can really job hop in and go.

We have a huge problem with data being stored in excel files, and business users using excel plugins to create their own visualizations. Part of my job is to kill those excel files and replicate it BETTER in Looker.

The ease of use and understandable interface make it easy for my team to use, so I no longer need to write queries all the time. The also have great staff who are really helpful!

The visuals are lacking and we still have some features we would like to see implemented, like conditional formatting. Mostly, there are very few negatives I could say

I would try Looker! The ease of use and flexibility make it a great product for any cloud oriented team. I particularly like the ability to auto upload data into Google Docs for extremely flexible dashboarding.

Looker allows everyone in my company to manipulate and view the data. It lets users of all levels work as they like. The levels of access even allow teams like our finance team to access what they need without any issues. I have realized an added boost to my time, which I can spend on new data sources and more analysis!

I really like how Looker has changed the model from "traditional BI tools". I don't know of one company that develops a BI platform with just one person. There is always a team or different groups of individuals contributing. Looker with their LookML at it's core, is uniquely suited for this environment.

I also love the number of significant releases Looker puts out each 4 to 6 weeks. With many vendors the "dot releases". have a few enhancements here and there. It seems like Looker is always delivering some seriously helpful functions each release.

because Looker focused on the foundation of the house (where it makes sense), some of the product needs some finish work. The interface has come a long way but it is still missing some basics like sub total in reports, font control, column width, that sort of thing.

Review the product from a real world perspective where you will have different levels of users all collaborating on the same data sets. Don't just go through the standard BI checklist that lists 'number of colors' or 'how many charts' can you make.

We are doing in depth analysis of our customers behavior with our product. We track all of their actions and analyze this data so that we can determine how to best serve our customers and anticipate their future needs. It involves a lot of data analyzed along a number of different dimensions.

The interface to create and run queries simplifies the process. Users do not need to know SQL to run complex data sets. You are also able to create queries and share them with your team. The ability to automatically send reports to your team, or to clients is a great way to report accurate up-to-date data.

There is no real downside to Looker which I have found. The interface is great, and my team is knowledgeable for assistance.

company to company hackathon

We are solving reporting, and information gains by using looker, and are able to standardize information with the pre-existing reports.

I love that it's super easy to give everyone in my company access to the data. Also I like the fact that LookML allows me to build in calculations and derived tables so I can automate and unify metrics for reporting. The support team is super awesome and helpful. Also I love the fact that Looker is constantly improving every release I get excited by a new feature and I have seen things that I felt we missing appear a couple of months laters. I have a lot of confidence that Looker will keep delivering a high quality product to me.

Table calculations are still a little stiff. They have definitely improved since they were initially rolled out, but I would love it if I could dump Excel entirely but unfortunately table calculations aren't there yet. Also I have found that the models lock you into one join path which means that some times I have to make to explores with similar tables just so the joins work better. In terms of looking at my database Looker is fantastic but it can't be our sole BI tool because it only looks at the database. This has been a main complaint of my management team which really doesn't care about the nitty gritty data of the business and just wants to see the overall picture from lots of different source.

Looker is most useful you have a large percentage of your data in a database and have a need to see specific pieces of data often. Then I highly recommend it because it allows you lots of flexibility to view your data lots of different ways. If you are the type of company that's ok with lots of static dashboards or you have lots of data stored in vendor tools then you probably aren't going to get a lot of value out of Looker.

Looker allows use to have visibility in to financial data before the books close because we can see as users make purchases and we pay vendors. It also allows are merchandising and account management team keep a close eye on customers and reviews allowing us to change our product offerings and reach out to ailing customers. We also have access to how our ops teams are doing to id which teams are delivery for effectively. Overall the great thing is Looker allows to spot problems through dashboards and alerts and then drill down to they very specific cause of the issue. This is super important in a business like ours which is daily and very operations heavy.

There are several things I like best:

- The ability to build a model with lookml for data analysis without building tables and etl. This is much more flexible, allowing you to adjust it as you go along. No more building for months to find out that it isn't quite what is needed now. I have done major refactoring twice that would have been weeks of work the old way, it took one day with Looker.

- The transparency of lookml. I have had the CFO of our company click to look at the lookml and copy and paste it into an email with corrections on a calculation. Makes it easy for users and for me.

- The power of lookml to make transformations easy and reusable. We use Fivetran for ETL and Redshift for the storage and have accomplished months of work in days.

There are some limitations to modeling this way, when you need more advanced options such as slowly changing dimensions or snapshot transaction fact tables, you will need to add some more traditional data warehouse ETL and tables in, but this is a very good option for the other 90+%.

Looker is working on an option for this, stay tuned. When tables can be updated as well as reloaded it will be 100%.

It is worth learning lookml if you are not a developer, it is consistent and straightforward. Looker models give much more flexibility than other reporting tools that use data sets.

This is great for small companies that could never afford to hire a team to build a traditional data warehouse.

Visibility of data to the lowest level in the format needed so that the people doing the work can make informed decisions in real time. Using LookML, it is simple to display data in multiple formats for different purposes.