G2

Przemysław .

Senior Software Developer

Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.)

11/6/2026

"Smooth Looker-to-Lightdash Migration with dbt-Native Modeling, Content as Code and No Vendor Lock-in"

4/5

What do you like best about Lightdash?

We self-host the open-source edition, so I can only speak about the free features. We moved from Looker this year, and the switch went better than we expected.

- dbt-native semantic layer. Dimensions, metrics, joins and row-level filters live in our dbt YAML next to the models. A single `lightdash deploy` in CI publishes them. We no longer maintain a second modelling language like LookML.

- Content as code. Charts and dashboards are YAML files that we keep in Git, review in pull requests and push with the CLI. This let us migrate dozens of Looker dashboards and saved Looks with a scripted, repeatable pipeline instead of rebuilding them by hand.

- Integrations. Lightdash works with our whole stack out of the box: dbt, Snowflake and Postgres as warehouses, our identity provider for SSO, Slack and email for scheduled deliveries, and GitHub Actions for deployment. The REST API works in the free edition, so we automate the rest ourselves.

- AI-friendly by design. Because the semantic layer and the content are plain YAML, AI coding agents can read, generate and validate them. We relied on AI agents heavily during the migration, and they still help us build new charts and dashboards. We have not used the built-in AI features, which are part of the paid plans.

- Pricing and ROI. The open-source edition has no licence fee, so after leaving Looker we pay only for hosting. The free edition still covers what matters to us: SSO, scheduled deliveries, user attributes for row-level security, and several projects on one instance (internal and customer-facing, US and EU).

- Flexibility. When a dbt model was not enough, the SQL Runner and virtual views let us build custom datasets for specific visualisations.

- UI, performance and onboarding. The interface is clean and queries feel fast. Onboarding our business users took very little effort: they switched from Looker very quickly and have not reported any loss of comfort.

- Support and open source. The documentation answered most of our questions. When something behaved unexpectedly, we read the source code and confirmed the behaviour ourselves, without waiting for a support ticket. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What do you dislike about Lightdash?

We use the open-source edition, so some of these points may be solved in the paid plans.

- Embedding is the biggest gap for us. The free edition has no native way to embed dashboards on external pages, whether through an iframe, signed URLs or an SDK. The paid plans offer this, but in the open-source edition we had to get creative and build our own solution around it. Coming from Looker, where we embedded dashboards for our customers, this was the hardest part of the migration.

- The API does not cover everything. Some settings that we wanted to manage as code, such as the organisation colour palette, needed a workaround. Virtual views from the SQL Runner cannot be kept as code at all, and some connection settings exist only in the UI.

- Coarse permissions. The free edition has only predefined roles. For example, we could not give a CI service account the right to deploy without also giving it the right to change the warehouse connection.

- No conditional feature switches. We cannot enable a feature, such as scheduled email delivery, for some users or content and keep it disabled for the rest.

- Scheduled deliveries are less flexible than in Looker. A chart schedule cannot override filters, so we wrapped some charts in dedicated dashboards just to send them with different filters.

- Smaller visual gaps compared with Looker. Booleans always display as True/False, there is no duration format, the x-axis title cannot be hidden, and grand totals do not work on combined bar and line charts. Each of these is minor, but together they meant extra work during the migration. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What problems is Lightdash solving and how is that benefiting you?

Our analytics use case is modest compared with larger companies. Looker was more platform than we needed, and we were paying for and maintaining capacity we did not use. Lightdash let us scale down to a tool that fits our size.

- Everything, or nearly everything, is code. Our semantic layer lives in dbt, and our charts and dashboards are YAML files in Git. Changes go through pull requests and CI, like the rest of our code. We can review, version and roll back analytics content the same way we treat the data models behind it.

- Lower cost. Cost was one of the main reasons for the migration. The open-source edition has no licence fee, so we pay only for the infrastructure we run it on, and that infrastructure is smaller than before.

- Independence from vendors. We self-host Lightdash, and the content lives in our own repositories. No external provider controls our data, our dashboards or our roadmap, and we can read and inspect the code when we need to.

- A simpler stack. Moving to a lighter tool simplified our data flow from dbt to dashboards and reduced the infrastructure we have to maintain. The result is fewer moving parts and additional savings. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.