We performed a comparison between Looker and Microsoft Power BI based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out what your peers are saying about Tableau, Qlik, MicroStrategy and others in Embedded BI."The stability of Looker has been good since I have been using it. However, it depends on what components are being used."
"I would rate the stability a ten out of ten. I didn't face any issues with stability."
"We can centralize all our data models."
"It is a pretty stable solution because it is a cloud-based product."
"The product is easy to use."
"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."
"From a developer's perspective, the way the functionality's being handled is great."
"It's quite effortless to navigate through various applications and review their updated data in real-time."
"In the process of using data there is the Extract, Transform and Load (ETL). For extracting we are using another software, for transforming we are using our own coding in C#, and then we use Microsoft BI for loading the information. Microsoft BI displays information very well."
"The most valuable features are the flexibility, how many ways you can interrogate the data, and the the graphical visualization."
"There was a lot of manual work involved with Excel, whereas once we moved on to Microsoft Power BI, it was a cleaner dashboard and it was faster too."
"The stability is good."
"The solution is very intuitive, you do not need to have too much programming knowledge to use it. Advanced Excel users can use it very easily."
"It is in the cloud, which makes it easy for mobile access of reports and data."
"The drill-down capabilities and automatic charts are the best ones. The visualization is also very good. In terms of visualization, no competing product, such as IBM Cognos or any other product, has the same capabilities."
"It is a little easier at buildings charts and graphs than Tableau."
"The visualization capability of the product is limited."
"The product does not have documented material."
"The integration with different databases must be improved."
"Stability needs improvement."
"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 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."
"Integrations with other BI tools could be better."
"It needs to be more user-friendly."
"Right now, their premium pricing is keeping us out of the premium market. The premium price per user just doesn't make sense for us, but we haven't reached the limit of 500 users to justify the premium."
"We would like it if they added more Python libraries in the Power BI service. For Power BI service right now, you can use Python, but it is limited to a few libraries or a few packages from Python."
"The initial installation is difficult."
"I would like to see a more user-friendly interface with Microsoft BI."
"Microsoft needs to provide more drivers to connect other data sources in a native way."
"The report server feature is quite limited."
"When you go to the cloud, its licensing is not intuitive. It is a little bit complex. When you have to purchase a new license, it is difficult to understand on their website what exactly you need to pay and how you can group. It is something that is applicable to all Microsoft products. They're not always so simple and clear when it comes to licensing. Their support can also be better in terms of explaining how they resolved an issue and what steps they took to resolve it. They are able to resolve the issue, but they can be better at explaining the approach they took to resolve the issue. It could have something in the direction of machine learning. It can have some kind of integration with machine learning where you can ask for some reports with natural language."
"I think that there should be visuals for financial reporting videos. It should just be a plug and play because there is a lot of coding that goes into it with different clients."
Looker is ranked 5th in Embedded BI with 19 reviews while Microsoft Power BI is ranked 1st in BI (Business Intelligence) Tools with 297 reviews. Looker is rated 8.0, while Microsoft Power BI is rated 8.0. The top reviewer of Looker writes "The APIs are exposed at every level, so it's highly modular". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Microsoft Power BI writes "A complete ecosystem with an builtin ETL tool, good integrations with python and R, and support of DAX and Power Query (M languages)". Looker is most compared with Amazon QuickSight, Tableau, Google Data Studio, Databricks and IBM Cognos, whereas Microsoft Power BI is most compared with Tableau, Amazon QuickSight, KNIME, Domo and Oracle OBIEE.
We monitor all Embedded BI reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.
