A High-Level Overview of Looker — An Excerpt from Our BI Tool Comparison Guide

2 min readOct 18, 2021

When paired with a modern data warehouse, implementing a leading business intelligence (BI) tool, like Looker, can help your organization use your data to gain powerful insights to help you make the strongest decisions for your business.

In this post, we’ll provide a high-level overview of Looker, including a description of the tool, why you should use it, pros and cons, and easily integrated tools and technologies to augment your Looker reporting.

Overview of Looker

Looker is a powerful BI tool that can help a business develop insightful visualizations. Among other benefits, users can create interactive and dynamic dashboards, schedule and automate the distribution of reports, set custom parameters to receive alerts, and utilize embedded analytics.

Why Use Looker

If you’re looking for a single source of truth, customized visuals, collaborative dashboards, and top-of-the-line customer support, Looker might be the best BI platform for you. Being fully browser-based cuts down on confusion as your team gets going, and customized pricing means you get exactly what you need.

Pros of Looker

Looker offers performant and scalable analytics on a near-real-time basis.
Because you need to define logic before creating visuals, it enforces a single-source-of-truth semantic layer.
Looker is completely browser-based, eliminating the need for desktop software.
It facilitates dashboard collaboration, allowing parallel development and publishing with out-of-the-box git integration.

Cons of Looker

Looker can be more expensive than competitors like Microsoft Power BI; so while adding Looker to an existing BI ecosystem can be beneficial, you will need to take costs into consideration.
Compared to Tableau, visuals aren’t as elegant and the platform isn’t as intuitive.
Coding in LookML is unavoidable, which may present a roadblock for report developers who have minimal experience with SQL.

Select Complementary Tools and Technologies for Looker

We hope you found this high-level overview of Looker helpful. If you’re interested in learning more about Looker reporting or how other leading BI tools, like Tableau and Power BI, may suit your organization, contact us to learn more.

The content of this blog is an excerpt of our 2021 Business Intelligence Tool Comparison Guide. Click here to download a copy of the guide.

Originally published at https://aptitive.com on October 18, 2021.