Looker

Excellent tool Data visualization and analytics

Comments: Looker has been my go to tool for analytics, reporting and dashboarding. It is very easy to learn for an individual. It is user friendly as well. Overall good experience from the tool. It is way better than Tableau and Qlik.

Pros:

First and foremost, the most important feature of Looker is, it is cloud based BI tool which can be accessed remotely and easy to work unless like other tools where it requires to be installed in the PC.It has clean and simple UI which is very to build dashboards and reports.Lookml option provides benefit of flexibility in code which in turn help to create own metrics and create calculations. This helps for the marketer or developer to have the control of the metrics Data modelling is very easy to create and Looker has the capacity to sync with various connectors to access the data from other sources, which solves the use case of having 3rd party connectors.

Cons:

The new interface of swapping between read-only and developer is not that great. The older version was better as compared to the new one. Customer support is gone from good to bad. When I had queries , customer support team could not help as they themselves were not aware of the tool and also they share articles which are available with google search to diagnose.The codes should have an option to export to PDF.

Looker Review

Pros:

Easy to create dashboards without engineers needing to write code.

Cons:

Still not very good yet for a multi-tenant embedded environment. Needs a lot of work to set up and the API is slow.

Controlled Analytics Exploration

Comments: Like I said, it's a great tool for analysts that don't need a lot of flexibility or maybe just aren't used to working with a lot of data. To get the full value out of this software, you'll need a core group of experienced Data Analysts that can learn fast (to learn Lookers Table Calculation code which is similar to SQL) who can build a bunch of dashboards and views. You really don't want people who aren't savvy with data doing a lot of the creating because measures are always aggregated based on the dimensions you pull into each table...if a user forgets to add a specific dimension then measures could show the wrong value. This could be offset by having really good developers who architect the data in a way that doesn't allow this to happen.

Pros:

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.

Cons:

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 - another type of reporting

Comments: Looker (and data) is all you need for a good business analysis. It has exactly what you need for data visualization, analytics and predictions.

Pros:

The most I like that you can import data from different sources. Making charts and graphs from all data you have allows you to do very accurate prediction on the business. Sharing the reports with different colleagues from other departments is easy and important.

Cons:

Is a little complicated until you come to the final dashboard design, too many options (might be only me).

Easy to use hard to master

Pros:

Very easy for Self service BI: Enabled our marketing teams to work directly on data without getting the Data engineering team involved,

Cons:

There is a lot of room for improvement. Data connectors should be added more.