Looker Room for 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.
You can't create very attractive visuals with the built-in features, but I think they're providing some extensions to develop different visualizations. Looker can't create multiple sheets. You can only create one dashboard. It's not that you're able to toggle through different sheets to navigate different visuals. It's just one and people have to scroll through the dashboard. So scrolling is not something that people generally like to do, rather than segregating them in multiple tabs of sheets.
Some basic feature that is available in other reporting tools is missing. Looker has the ability to show more than 5,000 rows for operational reporting.
Some reporting tools allow users to scroll down to see more than 5,000 rows, but in Looker, you have to download the entire dataset. Looker should consider adding a scroll-down option to allow users to view large datasets on screen without downloading them.
Looker has some options for granting users access as viewers. However, viewers cannot download the entire dataset. Only superusers can download the whole dataset on the Explore screen. This is a big limitation, as you cannot give any user viewer access. You can give access to superuser access, which is a cost to the company.
Integrations with other BI tools could be better. Big companies are using different tools and different stacks.
Also, the plan and roadmap should be more transparent. This would allow end users to correlate or plan company features and align them with Looker's plans and features.
Support is generally good, particularly the online support where you can quickly chat with an engineer to resolve questions. However, for more complicated issues, like a cache issue we encountered for embedded networks, the resolution can lag. Issues can remain unsolved for a while. The process of raising a product feature can also be lengthy.
Buyer's Guide
Looker
March 2024
Learn what your peers think about Looker. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: March 2024.
765,386 professionals have used our research since 2012.
I can say many things about the parts that need to be improved in Looker. 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. Blending data from different sources is not something that can be done easily.
PR
Pavan-Reddy
Senior Manager Analytics at Aarki, Inc.
The solution could have more integrations with different data sources and support real-time querying. Currently, it has integration with Google Sheets.
Looker's visualization capabilities are not yet ready to be shared with clients. The current visualizations are basic and only intended for internal users. The styling and design aspects of the visualizations are still under development. The Visualization could be customized.
Stability needs improvement.
View full review »SK
reviewer1856880
Vice President Engineering at a pharma/biotech company with 5,001-10,000 employees
They need to work more on interactivity in order to help users interact with the tool itself.
It needs to be more user-friendly. People should be able to access the tool in a much easier way when they are trying to develop something. Finding items is harder on Looker than it is on, for example, Tableau.
Looker needs to provide a better user interface.
Training should be freely available on platforms like YouTube. That way, people can go and learn the tool. Tableau and Power BI already provide a lot of free training and users can go and learn anything they need on their own. Looker is at a disadvantage when they don't have proper training easily available.
I have not seen much penetration in the market in terms of marketing. They don't seem to be doing any marketing with the tool.
They seem to be moving towards machine learning. However, they need to create a separate space for themselves in the market.
Looker just shows whatever we have in SQL databases. It would be helpful if the product could retrieve user data and store it in Google BigQuery. The product does not have documented material. It does not have any active live projects that users could work through.
The response time can be a little bit better. I know that it depends on my data ingestion and the kind of database I am using. The integration with different databases must be improved.
View full review »NW
reviewer2143233
Student at a university with 501-1,000 employees
The visualization capability of the product is limited. From an improvement perspective, the product should have more visualization capability. I can't clean data in Looker, and if I try to do it, then it is a really big process, which contributes to the tool's limiting factors related to the area of pre-processing of data. The tool should offer more visualization capabilities and processing abilities.
RH
reviewer1198944
PhD/ Doctorial Candidate: Electric-/Electronics-Development at a transportation company with 10,001+ employees
For any tailoring, we would contact our sales reps.
View full review »Some of the visualizations are a bit limited on how much you can customize them. That said, Looker pushes frequent releases, and they typically contain improvements to visualization options.
View full review »I want to have temporary derived tables so that users can prepare data sets before exploring them and committing code. I am looking forward to the upcoming improvements in workspace security. This will allow me to remove a lot of visual noise from my c-level customers, by reducing what they see in the UI to just what matters to them.
View full review »User and group management in conjunction with dashboard organization used to be our only struggle, but Looker recently addressed this with a major upgrade.
View full review »Features related to visualization should continue to be improved. While these are strong as they are now, there's always a unique way to visualize data to improve your understanding about an organization.
For our use case (business intelligence, data visualization), Looker is fantastic. I suppose that being the best within a focused, valuable segment of the market is the most important thing, but for those who demand being the best at all sorts of data analysis, Looker could continue to expand its capabilities. For instance, they could offer 3D charts for even deeper insights. However, this might be outside the scope of expectations for this product.
I think that their features are impressive as is, and their product team continues to excel at creating features for users to extract interesting and actionable information from their data.
View full review »This product is useful for non-technical users, who are able to use the interface to easily slice data. But for the admin users who are responsible for maintaining the schemas and files behind the scenes, it can easily become a chore, as there is a lot of manual work involved in defining the schemas of the connected database(s), as well as any refactored tables; the restrictive syntax also makes maintenance difficult. A personal feature request I have is the ability to create reports in such a way that the end users can inject values into the query and dynamically change the results in this way.
View full review »There are a few areas of the product where there hasn't been enough time spent making the interface user-friendly. Creating complex filters on reports or dashboard-wide filters, for example, requires guessing at the appropriate syntax, rather than having the super easy to use dropdowns that are available for simple filters.
View full review »Their needs to be much more control of visualizations to become more on par with Tableau. We have to jump through a lot of hoops to do simple things like control what range is displayed on the X-axis of a trend chart. Also want more chart types: heat maps, for instance.
View full review »There is a lot of customization that we needed/need to build ourselves. Other BI tools have more out of the box. For example, products like RJ Metrics and Google Analytics come with pre-built dashboards based on your data; examples such as conversion rate over time or sales by product. We had to build those in Looker ourselves.
Also, it is often slow.
View full review »Buyer's Guide
Looker
March 2024
Learn what your peers think about Looker. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: March 2024.
765,386 professionals have used our research since 2012.