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."With Looker, I have experienced benefits in terms of usability and shareability."
"The stability of Looker has been good since I have been using it. However, it depends on what components are being used."
"It is a pretty stable solution because it is a cloud-based product."
"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."
"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."
"The solution is easy to use."
"The drag and drop facility to easily change the data correctly is the most valuable feature. I am happy to see visualizations. It's easier to talk about and make people understand what is going on."
"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 best thing about this solution is that it is very user friendly. It is interactive in terms of visualizations. It is very eye-catching, and it attracts users. There are a lot of options to visualize the data in different drafts and views. I have used different visualization tools, and I found Power BI to be more efficient in terms of performance, user-friendliness, and ease of use."
"Microsoft BI is scalable."
"The most valuable features of Microsoft BI are the variety of possibilities to connect to various data sources. The visualizations are easily done, have useful rollover functions, and there are continuous updates being made to the system. You can benefit from the various improvements."
"Reporting is the best thing about Power BI. And it could help improve decision-making in many ways. Power BI is flexible and easier to use compared to tools."
"The solution is not that difficult to install, although this will vary with the experience of the person responsible for its installation."
"The visualization capability of the product is limited."
"Integrations with other BI tools could be better."
"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."
"The integration with different databases must be improved."
"Stability needs improvement."
"It needs to be more user-friendly."
"The product does not have documented material."
"It's quite difficult to learn how to use Power BI."
"They are improving it all the time. What would be nice is if they could respond to feature requests more quickly. They can provide faster support for new features."
"It has limited performance capabilities in terms of connecting to large transactional databases, but it is fine for simple and quick queries from Excel spreadsheets or one table. The premium level is going to be more applicable for the higher transaction-level databases."
"The solution could benefit by allowing deeper data analytics."
"There are certain features that are only available in the cloud version. It would be beneficial if they could be brought down to the on-premise version without the necessity of using the enterprise SQL database, as that can be very costly. We need more cost-effective features that are available in the cloud to be accessible on-premise."
"Most of the dashboarding tools have prebuilt graphs. So, you have to stick with them, unless you are going to use a third-party tool to create them, and then you are going to upload them to the BI tool. In Power BI, they started supporting this functionality and created a tool for that, but it isn't yet complete and mature. It is still exceeding the expectations and is better than most of the BI tools when it comes to creating custom graphs, but it needs more enhancement and simplification. It would be good to have a design tool provided by Power BI to design the graphs that we want and set the figures that we want on them."
"The visualization aspect, while being the most visible to business users, also happens the be the weakest point in the entire Microsoft BI stack."
"Microsoft BI can improve some of the visual level filters or visual functionality, that are available in other BI tools, such as Tableau or Qlik Sense."
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.
