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."It is a cost-effective solution."
"Databricks' most valuable features are the workspace and notebooks. Its integration, interface, and documentation are also good."
"Its lightweight and fast processing are valuable."
"Can cut across the entire ecosystem of open source technology to give an extra level of getting the transformatory process of the data."
"Databricks allows me to automate the creation of a cluster, optimized for machine learning and construct AI machine learning models for the client."
"The capacity of use of the different types of coding is valuable. Databricks also has good performance because it is running in spark extra storage, meaning the performance and the capacity use different kinds of codes."
"The ability to stream data and the windowing feature are valuable."
"There are good features for turning off clusters."
"It's quite effortless to navigate through various applications and review their updated data in real-time."
"From a developer's perspective, the way the functionality's being handled is great."
"I would rate the stability a ten out of ten. I didn't face any issues with stability."
"It is a pretty stable solution because it is a cloud-based product."
"With Looker, I have experienced benefits in terms of usability and shareability."
"The product is easy to use."
"The stability of Looker has been good since I have been using it. However, it depends on what components are being used."
"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."
"Scalability is an area with certain shortcomings. The solution's scalability needs improvement."
"I would like it if Databricks made it easier to set up a project."
"I would like more integration with SQL for using data in different workspaces."
"Support for Microsoft technology and the compatibility with the .NET framework is somewhat missing."
"I would like it if Databricks adopted an interface more like R Studio. When I create a data frame or a table, R Studio provides a preview of the data. In R Studio, I can see that it created a table with so many columns or rows. Then I can click on it and open a preview of that data."
"Anyone who doesn't know SQL may find the product difficult to work with."
"The solution has some scalability and integration limitations when consolidating legacy systems."
"There are no direct connectors — they are very limited."
"It needs to be more user-friendly."
"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."
"Integrations with other BI tools could be better."
"The product does not have documented material."
"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."
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 Data Science Studio, Microsoft Azure Machine Learning Studio and Dremio, whereas Looker is most compared with Amazon QuickSight, Tableau, Google Data Studio, Qlik Sense and SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform.
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