Looker

Looker is incredibly easy to use for a casual user, which most of our users are. As soon as your email is activated, you have access to the product and new users need very little direction to start getting value out of it.

Relative to other BI tools, the advanced charting functionality is somewhat limited, but frankly that's not the main reason we bought Looker. Data scientists can use another tool of their choice, we have Looker for people who aren't data scientists.

Looker is a tool that has allowed us, through the collection and representation, in a very comfortable control panel where the data is shown, helping the analysis and making the appropriate decisions for the growth of our business. I like how easy it is to understand Looker's operation to start taking advantage of its features, in addition to having a very attentive customer service team.

So far we haven't had any problems or inconveniences with Looker, it has given us what we needed.

It's a great data exploration tool for users who normally would get anxious when given a large dataset in something like Excel. It's generally simple to use and there can be unlimited Viewers (users at the lowest permissions level) through the enterprise product. Data Visualization is essentially done for you and Exploers (users at the second level of permissions) can build new visualizations & turn them into interactive dashboards.

On the Looker platform, Explorers can locate a view (called an Explore) and then are given a list of dimensions and measures they can pull into a table. Users can create new dimensions using calculated fields and then save their views so any users with Viewer permissions (and up) can see what was put together.

With simplicity comes lack of flexibility. More skilled data analysts will want more flexibility than Looker can provide but at the same time you need to have highly skilled Data Analysts to be the Developers (high level of permissions) to set up the data so that less skilled analysts (the users who benefit from Looker most) who are Explorers don't build views that grossly misrepresent the data.

My biggest pet peeve with this software as an Explorer is that you cannot make calculations on the base data...only the data that you pull into your table (called table calculations). That is a major feature that Tableau has that Looker does not have at the Explorer permission level. Of course developers can use LookML (Lookers data language) to create a new column...but a Developer license is more expensive and creating the fields take time and it's something you constantly will need.

Looker is a very complete tool that allows you to build customized dashboard and KPI tracking reports. I really enjoy the level of customization it allows (different type of charts, tables, etc.) as well as how easy it is to share it with your team. I recommend this tool!

Looker requires a bit of technical knowledge about data analytics in order to customize some of the tables and reports. If you don't have much knowledge in this field, it might be a bit hard to create the reports and tables with the data you're looking for.