Kibana vs. Looker

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Kibana
Score 7.3 out of 10
N/A
Kibana allows users to visualize Elasticsearch data and navigate the Elastic Stack so you can do anything from tracking query load to understanding the way requests flow through your apps.N/A
Looker
Score 8.7 out of 10
N/A
Looker is a BI application with an analytics-oriented application server that sits on top of relational data stores. It includes an end-user interface for exploring data, a reusable development paradigm for data discovery, and an API for supporting data in other systems.N/A
Pricing
KibanaLooker
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
KibanaLooker
Free Trial
NoYes
Free/Freemium Version
NoNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeRequired
Additional DetailsMust contact sales team for pricing.
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
KibanaLooker
Considered Both Products
Kibana
Chose Kibana
Well when it comes to using Kibana when compared to Datadog, I can say that Kibana is pretty [...] cheap. Apart from APM and Datadog hosted agents, Kibana gives a good competition to Datadog for real time log analysis as well as metrics analysis.
While OpsGenie is a great tool …
Chose Kibana
Stackdriver and CloudWatch are not as intuitive and easy-to-use as Kibana, and do not offer such advanced filtering capabilities.

Google BigQuery is not really suitable for real-time searches.
Looker
Chose Looker
Better in terms of data configuration with slight harder learning curve, available help material is not that much and we usually have to connect with Looker Help with chat for our data and analysis questions. While Looker offers a wide range of visualization options, there were …
Chose Looker
It takes forever sometimes to have data ready in tableau dashboard, and also it takes effort to maintain each dashboards. We do not have so many efforts to maintain all. Also, we need to be able to see data faster and therefore take actions and work faster. With Looker we might …
Chose Looker
Looker Studio is not as robust as Tableau or Microsoft BI. So it does not provide quite as much insight or depth and it has more limitations overall then the other major reporting products. However, it is also free and connects perfectly with other Google products. Plus, all of …
Chose Looker
Technically, Power BI is much more complete and powerful, but it's like an ocean liner. I didn't need all that equipment. In my case, I needed to move more quickly, like on a speedboat, to build a page with several data sources in a single source of truth that could be easily …
Chose Looker
Looker is a free tool to use on the basic level, which can't really compare apples to apples since all of the other services are paid services. Looker already has a leg up because of that. The other platforms definitely have more features and capabilities off the bat because it …
Chose Looker
The learning curve for Tableau Cloud was too steep for our team. After watching a couple of YouTube videos, anyone can begin connecting data sources and creating reports with Looker. Looker is also free with Google Workspace, making the decision between Looker and Tableau a …
Chose Looker
Tableau did not have the customization that we were told it had, and it was expensive. Domo looks promising, but is also expensive so we haven't purchased it (we may in the future). Google Sheets was very basic and did fine for what it was, but we needed something a bit more …
Chose Looker
Looker seems to be all inclusive in data analysis and reporting. Along with the ability to forecast and add specific metrics to data sets. The automatic reporting sending them on scheduled days is great as well. The only concern is the ease of use as it requires high level …
Chose Looker
I don't remember much about Tableau, but it was chaotic and poorly set up for our company.
Chose Looker
I have not used any other products like Looker before and the company has been using Looker since I've joined. We've talked about replacing other software vendors in the past but never discussed replacing Looker because of how vital it is to our organization.
Chose Looker
Looker is a great fit for our company because we have collaborative analytics workflows and complicated data ecosystems and because of its strengths in data modeling, integration, and collaboration.
Brand name and peer recommendations also helps us to select Looker against …
Chose Looker
Our organization is going all in on Google products so switching out of the Microsoft suite of tools is a no brainer. All the Google tools work incredibly well together and once you transition it’s incredibly hard to be half in half out between Google and Microsoft. If you’re a …
Chose Looker
Looker is more mailable; it allows more dynamic visualisations, filters, drilldowns etc. It's sharing capabilities are also more streamlined than AWS Quicksight. However in contrast to this AWS Quicksight can leverage AWS IAM roles and policies which can be quite scalable. …
Chose Looker
Looker is free, so it's certainly better bang for your buck. It's a good platform for someone who just needs a quick way to look at the data they have. It doesn't have some of the advanced functionality that Tableau has, but it integrates well with the Google ecosystem, so it's …
Chose Looker
In terms of reporting specifically Looker Studio allows to integrate way more sources into a single report. If needed sources can be blended and parameters can be created with calculations etc
Chose Looker
We haven't had a proper benchmarking done. We might consider looking at other options, but this thing is deeply integrated into our platform, so not anytime soon.
Chose Looker
I choose Looker when I need quick charts. It is easier to start and configure, browser-based, and easy to connect with Google Sheets. This gives it a good competitive advantage when comparing pricing—other similar tools have expensive licenses. In a corporate Google …
Chose Looker
Looker and Tableau are similar products with benefits and drawbacks according to which software you choose to employ. Looker is a Google product whereas Tableau is a Salesforce product. Depending on your existing tech stack it is recommended to leverage the integrated, native …
Chose Looker
Looker is web based app and much easier to use.¨ON the othe hand Power BI offers robust integration with Microsoft products (like Azure, SQL Server, and Excel) and a wide range of other data sources. Power BI's ability to seamlessly connect and import data from these sources is …
Chose Looker
We use both Looker and Tableau. It depends on the specific team. However, there is a clear correlation that we use Tableau more often when there are more data sources, including financial data.
Features
KibanaLooker
BI Standard Reporting
Comparison of BI Standard Reporting features of Product A and Product B
Kibana
9.0
Ratings
7% above category average
Looker
8.6
Ratings
5% above category average
Pixel Perfect reports9.00 Ratings8.70 Ratings
Customizable dashboards9.00 Ratings9.00 Ratings
Report Formatting Templates9.00 Ratings8.30 Ratings
Ad-hoc Reporting
Comparison of Ad-hoc Reporting features of Product A and Product B
Kibana
5.7
Ratings
33% below category average
Looker
8.5
Ratings
5% above category average
Drill-down analysis7.00 Ratings8.10 Ratings
Formatting capabilities7.00 Ratings7.80 Ratings
Report sharing and collaboration3.00 Ratings9.20 Ratings
Integration with R or other statistical packages00 Ratings8.70 Ratings
Report Output and Scheduling
Comparison of Report Output and Scheduling features of Product A and Product B
Kibana
8.8
Ratings
4% above category average
Looker
8.8
Ratings
6% above category average
Publish to Web9.50 Ratings8.30 Ratings
Publish to PDF8.50 Ratings9.10 Ratings
Report Versioning9.00 Ratings8.60 Ratings
Report Delivery Scheduling9.00 Ratings9.10 Ratings
Delivery to Remote Servers8.00 Ratings00 Ratings
Data Discovery and Visualization
Comparison of Data Discovery and Visualization features of Product A and Product B
Kibana
8.8
Ratings
8% above category average
Looker
6.9
Ratings
14% below category average
Pre-built visualization formats (heatmaps, scatter plots etc.)7.00 Ratings8.10 Ratings
Location Analytics / Geographic Visualization9.50 Ratings8.10 Ratings
Predictive Analytics10.00 Ratings4.60 Ratings
Access Control and Security
Comparison of Access Control and Security features of Product A and Product B
Kibana
-
Ratings
Looker
8.3
Ratings
2% below category average
Multi-User Support (named login)00 Ratings8.70 Ratings
Role-Based Security Model00 Ratings8.10 Ratings
Multiple Access Permission Levels (Create, Read, Delete)00 Ratings8.10 Ratings
Report-Level Access Control00 Ratings8.10 Ratings
Mobile Capabilities
Comparison of Mobile Capabilities features of Product A and Product B
Kibana
-
Ratings
Looker
6.2
Ratings
23% below category average
Responsive Design for Web Access00 Ratings7.40 Ratings
Mobile Application00 Ratings5.00 Ratings
Dashboard / Report / Visualization Interactivity on Mobile00 Ratings7.30 Ratings
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KibanaLooker
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Supermetrics
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Score 10.0 out of 10
BrightGauge
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Score 9.1 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
Supermetrics
Supermetrics
Score 10.0 out of 10
Reveal
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Score 10.0 out of 10
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Dataiku
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Score 9.9 out of 10
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User Ratings
KibanaLooker
Likelihood to Recommend
7.0
(0 ratings)
8.7
(0 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
-
(0 ratings)
9.5
(0 ratings)
Usability
-
(0 ratings)
8.8
(0 ratings)
Availability
-
(0 ratings)
10.0
(0 ratings)
Performance
-
(0 ratings)
6.0
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
7.7
(0 ratings)
8.8
(0 ratings)
Implementation Rating
-
(0 ratings)
10.0
(0 ratings)
Configurability
-
(0 ratings)
10.0
(0 ratings)
Ease of integration
-
(0 ratings)
10.0
(0 ratings)
Product Scalability
-
(0 ratings)
10.0
(0 ratings)
Vendor post-sale
-
(0 ratings)
10.0
(0 ratings)
Vendor pre-sale
-
(0 ratings)
10.0
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
KibanaLooker
Likelihood to Recommend
Great for teams big and small that want a single pane of glass for understanding their systems, from dev, to staging, to production. Well-suited for teams that need to preserve logs for long-term compliance reasons, and also mine their logs for useful operational insights. Highly recommended as both an open source project and a commercial offering with fantastic paid support.
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When you need to create a centralised dashboard for multiple stakeholders that blends cross-channel reporting. As an SEO agency reporting for clients - Looker is a great solution. It's less appropriate depending on the intended users. For instance, in my experience Looker reports have been under-utilised because they're not accessed regularly, provide too much noise or often simple PDF reports are preferred
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Pros
  • searching
  • near real-time
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  • It is very easy to start a new dashboard and configure what you want to display by just selecting/dragging from the list of available columns.
  • It is intuitive, mainly if you use other Google services like Google Sheets.
  • The look and feel is modern and nice.
  • It it very useful to have an immediate visual overview of the data in a spreadsheet.
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Cons
  • Improved tutorial/ user guidance
  • Improved labeling for sources
  • Ease of login and sharing with coworkers
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  • I wish I could get more granular in the Google ad data, such as down to the campaign type, instead of having to see only all campaigns.
  • The setup can be time-consuming if you're not using the product regularly.
  • Editing the dashboard requires a few logins; I wish it was more seamless.
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Likelihood to Renew
No answers on this topic
We are very haooy with Looker, it provides us with all the funciomalities we need for both the day to day oerformance tracking and longer periods reporting. It is easy to use for account managers, configurable and customizable for soecialists and what is most imoortant, our clinets generally really love it
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Usability
Its usability is generally good and it provides teams with a basic to intermediate understanding about data visualization. It is very user-friendly when it comes to creating dashboards. The UI is very good and simple. Its integration with other tools for alerting and reporting is amazing. But its advance features have a learning curve and a first timer needs some time to use the advance features.
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Looker is relatively easy to use, even as it is set up. The customers for the front-end only have issues with the initial setup for looker ml creations. Other "looks" are relatively easy to set up, depending on the ETL and the data which is coming into Looker on a regular basis.
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Reliability and Availability
No answers on this topic
No objections
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Performance
No answers on this topic
Somehow resources heavy, both on server and client. I recommned at least 50Mbs data rate and high performance desktop comouter to be abke to run comolex tasks and configure larger amount of data. On the other hand, the client does not need to worry when viewing, the performance is usually ok
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Support Rating
I have not contacted Kibana support.
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Never had to work with support for issues. Any questions we had, they would respond promptly and clearly. The one-time setup was easy, by reading documentation. If the feature is not supported, they will add a feature request. In this case, LDAP support was requested over OKTA. They are looking into it.
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Implementation Rating
No answers on this topic
Very satisfied, easy to implement
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Alternatives Considered
Well when it comes to using Kibana when compared to Datadog, I can say that Kibana is pretty [...] cheap. Apart from APM and Datadog hosted agents, Kibana gives a good competition to Datadog for real time log analysis as well as metrics analysis. While OpsGenie is a great tool for alerting, it lacks visualization when compared to Kibana. Grafana is another opensource tool that gives a lot of insights like Kibana but Grafana cannot be easily integrated with OpenSearch.
Read full review
In my opinion, Looker is no Power BI. It is good, but I think Power BI is amazing. That said, in my experience, Power BI is nowhere near as easy to setup and report on Google services as Looker is. We plan to continue using Power BI for c-suite and corporate reporting, especially for internal databases, but will gladly use Looker for our marketing information for AdWords, Analytics, Search Console, and YouTube.
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Return on Investment
  • First stop when diagnosing production performance issues.
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  • Other than some people not liking the numbers, I don't see any negative impacts; we haven't experienced that.
  • The reports help us unravel the story of our users and how they are sifting through our pages.
  • Our clients enjoy seeing the numbers to understand better what stands out on their sites.
  • The reports have helped us see what campaigns are working and where we need to tweak things.
  • The reports have enabled us to have better conversations with stakeholders about how their web pages should be modified, edited, etc., to reflect the data.
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ScreenShots

Looker Screenshots

Screenshot of a Looker dashboard with a geo chart.