We performed a comparison between Databricks and Looker based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out what your peers are saying about Databricks, Microsoft, Alteryx and others in Data Science Platforms."Automation with Databricks is very easy when using the API."
"It's great technology."
"The simplicity of development is the most valuable feature."
"We can scale the product."
"The solution is an impressive tool for data migration and integration."
"There are good features for turning off clusters."
"What I like about Databricks is that it's one of the most popular platforms that give access to folks who are trying not just to do exploratory work on the data but also go ahead and build advanced modeling and machine learning on top of that."
"Databricks gives us the ability to build a lakehouse framework and do everything implicit to this type of database structure. We also like the ability to stream events. Databricks covers a broad spectrum, from reporting and machine learning to streaming events. It's important for us to have all these features in one platform."
"With Looker, I have experienced benefits in terms of usability and shareability."
"It is a pretty stable solution because it is a cloud-based product."
"The stability of Looker has been good since I have been using it. However, it depends on what components are being used."
"It's quite effortless to navigate through various applications and review their updated data in real-time."
"We can centralize all our data models."
"From a developer's perspective, the way the functionality's being handled is great."
"Looker allows you to generate the most optimal SQL queries in a DC through UI actions. We had signed a contract with Google Cloud to use BigQuery. That was the primary reason we adopted Looker. It works better with BigQuery than any other BI platform. We also like how this tool was developed. It was designed with an eye toward microservices architecture."
"The product is easy to use."
"Anyone who doesn't know SQL may find the product difficult to work with."
"Databricks is an analytics platform. It should offer more data science. It should have more features for data scientists to work with."
"The connectivity with various BI tools could be improved, specifically the performance and real time integration."
"I would love an integration in my desktop IDE. For now, I have to code on their webpage."
"Databricks has a lack of debuggers, and it would be good to see more components."
"The Databricks cluster can be improved."
"I'm not the guy that I'm working with Databricks on a daily basis. I'm on the management team. However, my team tells me there are limitations with streaming events. The connectors work with a small set of platforms. For example, we can work with Kafka, but if we want to move to an event-driven solution from AWS, we cannot do it. We cannot connect to all the streaming analytics platforms, so we are limited in choosing the best one."
"In the future, I would like to see Data Lake support. That is something that I'm looking forward to."
"It needs to be more user-friendly."
"The product does not have documented material."
"Looker doesn't connect to Excel, which is a huge disappointment because a lot of data is presented in Excel. Also, it can't consume data directly from REST APIs, which is necessary. Looker needs to expand its horizons when it comes to data sources. The inability to connect to different data sources is hampering our use cases. Currently, it only has an ODBC connection that connects to a database. It needs to connect to other data sources, such as Excel, APIs, and different platforms."
"The visualization capability of the product is limited."
"The integration with different databases must be improved."
"The main area of concern in Looker is probably related to blending the data from the different sources, including the data present internally in the company and on the cloud."
"Stability needs improvement."
"Integrations with other BI tools could be better."
Databricks is ranked 1st in Data Science Platforms with 78 reviews while Looker is ranked 5th in Embedded BI with 19 reviews. Databricks is rated 8.2, while Looker is rated 8.0. The top reviewer of Databricks writes "A nice interface with good features for turning off clusters to save on computing". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Looker writes "The APIs are exposed at every level, so it's highly modular". Databricks is most compared with Amazon SageMaker, Informatica PowerCenter, Dataiku, Dremio and Microsoft Azure Machine Learning Studio, whereas Looker is most compared with Amazon QuickSight, Tableau, Google Data Studio, SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform and Qlik Sense.
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