Looker vs. Tableau Desktop

Looker

426 Reviews and Ratings

Tableau Desktop

2,288 Reviews and Ratings

Overview
Product	Rating	Most Used By	Product Summary	Starting Price
Looker	Score8.8 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
Tableau Desktop	Score8.1 out of 10	N/A	Tableau Desktop is a data visualization product from Tableau. It connects to a variety of data sources for combining disparate data sources without coding. It provides tools for discovering patterns and insights, data calculations, forecasts, and statistical summaries and visual storytelling.	$75 per month

Pricing

Looker

Tableau Desktop

No answers on this topic

Tableau: $75
per month per user
Tableau Enterprise: $115
per month per user

Pricing Offerings
Looker	Tableau Desktop
Free Trial
Yes	No
Free/Freemium Version
No	No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
Yes	Yes

Required

No setup fee

Must contact sales team for pricing.

All pricing plans are billed annually.

Community Pulse
Key User Insights
	Looker	Tableau Desktop
Considered Both Products	Google Verified User 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 … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User 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 … Incentivized Helpful? Thomas Holland Senior Manager of Digital Paid Marketing in Marketing at BAYADA Home Health Care (Hospital & Health Care, 10,001+ employees) 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 … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User 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 … Incentivized Helpful? Lee L Kennedy Senior Marketing Data Analyst in Marketing at Brondell (Marketing and Advertising, 51-200 employees) 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 … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Chose Looker I don't remember much about Tableau, but it was chaotic and poorly set up for our company. Incentivized Helpful? Verified User 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 … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User 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 … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User 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. Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Chose Looker Looker is considerably easier to learn than any of the other tools listed above. For example, Tableau does offer a robust selection of visualizations, however setting them up and plotting the data correctly is considerably harder than in Looker. Another major advantage of … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Chose Looker In terms of user interface and freedom of customization, Tableau is probably still better than Looker. However, Looker is very good in scenarios where multiple data sources and dashboards already exist within the organization and need to be integrated/unified in one place. That … Incentivized Helpful? Anson Abraham Data Lord in Engineering at PlaceIQ (Internet, 51-200 employees) Chose Looker Looker was easier to use, better integration with non-standard datastores, such as Prestodb, and Snowflake, and BigTable. Ease of manageability. Creation of reports faster and easier compared to QlikView. Tableau has better heat maps, however, Looker has better drill down in … Incentivized Helpful? Joe Hughes Senior DevOps Engineer in Information Technology at Simpli.fi (Online Media, 201-500 employees) Chose Looker Looker is cheaper, by far. Easier to manage. In the end, Looker was a better choice for us, even with its maintenance warts and the headaches with the APIs. Tableau licensing is difficult to manage, at the very least, whereas Looker is not. User management is much easier to … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Chose Looker Looker is a lot easier to connect with our data pipelines and for users to create their own scalable Explores. Before, analysts would have to create separate Tableau dashboards for each ask, but now with Lookers Explores, some teams are able to self serve and create their own … Incentivized Helpful? Jacob Rasmussen Software Engineer - Internal Systems in Engineering at Route (Computer Software, 51-200 employees) Chose Looker Looker was not as flexible as Tableau, but it provides more customization through code and it provides a consistent data model which can be nice. Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Chose Looker Looker empowers users to create their own views/dashboards from its web application. The last time I used Tableau (in 2015), only certain license holders could create content from the desktop application. Everyone else was a view only user. On that theme, we found Looker to be … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Chose Looker Tableau has an adoption issue of having to upgrade to the most recent Tableau reader. In my experience it was very difficult to get the sales team to do this. microstrategy was the most overly complicated reporting software I have ever used. You need a consultant to do … Incentivized Helpful? Rajender Singh Senior PLM engineer in Manufacturing at IGW (Mechanical Or Industrial Engineering, 5001-10,000 employees) 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 … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User 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. Incentivized Helpful? Verified User 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 … Incentivized Helpful? David Turner Director of Social Media in Marketing at Gaytravel (Marketing & Advertising, 51-200 employees) Chose Looker Looker is overall the best software for data visualization simply because it does not take a lot of time to onboard someone for this software and it still has tons of functionality. Incentivized Helpful? Shelby Bowden Graduate Research Assistant in Research & Development at Western Kentucky University (Higher Education, 1001-5000 employees) Chose Looker Looker provides really excellent customer service in comparison to other similar products. The sharing aspect of Looker is also a big plus, which allows multiple users to access the data at the same time. We have also found it to stand out among competitors with its dashboard … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Chose Looker Most of the other BI tools are fairly similar in terms of charting capabilities and performance. Looker stands out with its modeling layer and SQL free end-user interface. It also has a feature-rich API enabling you to embed Looker into your own web app to customize it further … Incentivized Helpful?	Tableau Jannika Rasi Senior Business Analyst in Product Management at Schibsted Marketplaces (Consumer Services, 501-1000 employees) Chose Tableau Desktop Tableau is more flexible than these - I liked QlikView old version a lot but have not used the Qlik Sense etc new ones. Tableau user logic is harder to understand than Looker Studio. However it's more trust worthy. Connecting internet sources to Tableau Desktop is much harder. … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Chose Tableau Desktop Looker has the benefit of being owned by Google and seamless interface with BigQuery. We didn't use BigQuery at the time, so the benefit wasn't realized. However, we are starting to use it more and more, and will be evaluating Looker again. The main drawback of Looker compared … Incentivized Helpful? Shubham Tiwari Data analyst in Information Technology at OnlineSales.ai (Information Technology & Services, 51-200 employees) Chose Tableau Desktop Tableau can create visually attractive customizable dashboards than can quickly by drag-drop while in power bi we can create simple dashboard. Power bi support lesser data source while in Tableau there is a lot of options When we talk about data handling tableau is a clear … Incentivized Helpful? Akhilesh Arya Assistant Professor at Geetanjali Institute of Technical Studies, Udaipur (Higher Education, 51-200 employees) Chose Tableau Desktop We shifted to Tableau as it performs better than power BI. Tableau can handle data from multiple data sources while Power BI is restricted to limited data sources. Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Chose Tableau Desktop It's easy to use and has a great selection of color palettes and templates. Easy to learn. Easy to share reports. Incentivized Helpful?
	Would buy again
	No answers on this topic	No answers on this topic
	Delivers good value for the price
	No answers on this topic	No answers on this topic
	Happy with the feature set
	No answers on this topic	No answers on this topic
	Lived up to sales and marketing promises
	No answers on this topic	No answers on this topic
	Implementation went as expected
No answers on this topic	No answers on this topic

TrustRadius Insights
	Looker	Tableau Desktop
Highlights	Research Team Insight Published April 24, 2020 Looker and Tableau Desktop are Business Intelligence tools designed to help users perform data analysis and create visualizations to display their findings. Both Business Intelligence tools are used by businesses of all sizes, though large enterprises prefer Tableau Desktop while Looker is most popular with mid-sized businesses. Tableau Desktop offers strong visualization features that allow data analysts to create sophisticated visualizations. Looker has robust analytics features that enable non-technical users to create simple queries, while technical staff can create complex, customized queries. Features Looker and Tableau Desktop both provide essential business intelligence features such as data visualization and analysis, but they also both have some standout features. Looker includes a library of analytics code blocks that allow new users to perform analysis on stored data easily. These code blocks are entirely customizable as well, so advanced users can create custom queries. Looker also offers many built-in integrations and has a flexible system for pulling in data from applications that don’t have a native integration. As a result, Looker can collect data from many sources without issue. Tableau Desktop includes OLAP compatibility, allowing for web-based analytics and data collection. Additionally, Tableau Desktop has APIs for many big data analytics tools, allowing for visualizations based on data analysis performed by big data software. Lastly, Tableau has robust visualization features that help users to create simple visualizations, or use advanced features to create complex, interactive visualizations. Limitations Though Looker and Tableau Desktop both have comprehensive features for business intelligence, they also have a few important limitations. Looker doesn’t have any support for OLAP, which makes web-based analytics more difficult. Companies that need to make use of OLAP may not be able to use Looker. Additionally, Looker doesn’t offer as many tools or integrations for big data analysis. Lastly, though Looker offers visualization features, they are not as sophisticated as the advanced visualizations that Tableau Desktop provides. Tableau Desktop doesn’t offer analytics tools that are as straightforward as Lookers analytics blocks. Performing analytics using Tableau requires technical staff to write queries using Tableau Desktop’s visual query language. Tableau Desktop’s tools for third-party data collection are not as robust as Looker’s multiple integrations and tools for third-party data collection. Pricing Looker pricing depends on the size and user needs of the business. Quotes from Looker can include or remove features as needed by the organization. Tableau Desktop pricing depends on the number of licenses purchased. The Viewer license costs $12.00 per month per user and allows for data viewing and interaction. The Explorer package costs $35.00 per month per user and allows for data querying and content sharing. Lastly, the Creator package costs $70.00 per month per user and allows for the creation of sophisticated visualization.

Features

Looker

Tableau Desktop

Comparison of BI Standard Reporting features of Looker and Tableau Desktop
Feature	Looker 8.8 117 Ratings	Tableau Desktop 8.3 167 Ratings
Pixel Perfect reports	8.996 Ratings	8.8139 Ratings
Customizable dashboards	9.0115 Ratings	8.4166 Ratings
Report Formatting Templates	8.499 Ratings	7.8145 Ratings

Comparison of Ad-hoc Reporting features of Looker and Tableau Desktop
Feature	Looker 8.5 116 Ratings	Tableau Desktop 8.7 164 Ratings
Drill-down analysis	8.2112 Ratings	8.6159 Ratings
Formatting capabilities	7.9114 Ratings	9.2162 Ratings
Integration with R or other statistical packages	8.947 Ratings	7.7122 Ratings
Report sharing and collaboration	9.2116 Ratings	9.2157 Ratings

Comparison of Report Output and Scheduling features of Looker and Tableau Desktop
Feature	Looker 8.9 112 Ratings	Tableau Desktop 8.1 158 Ratings
Publish to Web	8.494 Ratings	7.3149 Ratings
Publish to PDF	9.1100 Ratings	7.9149 Ratings
Report Versioning	8.775 Ratings	8.2116 Ratings
Report Delivery Scheduling	9.297 Ratings	9.2123 Ratings
Delivery to Remote Servers	00 Ratings	8.073 Ratings

Comparison of Data Discovery and Visualization features of Looker and Tableau Desktop
Feature	Looker 7.0 113 Ratings	Tableau Desktop 8.4 156 Ratings
Pre-built visualization formats (heatmaps, scatter plots etc.)	8.2109 Ratings	9.0154 Ratings
Location Analytics / Geographic Visualization	8.297 Ratings	8.2149 Ratings
Predictive Analytics	4.66 Ratings	8.6126 Ratings
Pattern Recognition and Data Mining	00 Ratings	8.02 Ratings

Comparison of Access Control and Security features of Looker and Tableau Desktop
Feature	Looker 8.3 112 Ratings	Tableau Desktop 8.7 142 Ratings
Multi-User Support (named login)	8.7106 Ratings	9.0139 Ratings
Role-Based Security Model	8.293 Ratings	8.0119 Ratings
Multiple Access Permission Levels (Create, Read, Delete)	8.2106 Ratings	8.8129 Ratings
Report-Level Access Control	8.245 Ratings	9.03 Ratings
Single Sign-On (SSO)	00 Ratings	8.877 Ratings

Comparison of Mobile Capabilities features of Looker and Tableau Desktop
Feature	Looker 6.3 84 Ratings	Tableau Desktop 8.0 135 Ratings
Responsive Design for Web Access	7.681 Ratings	8.2124 Ratings
Mobile Application	5.01 Ratings	7.097 Ratings
Dashboard / Report / Visualization Interactivity on Mobile	7.575 Ratings	8.8117 Ratings

Comparison of Application Program Interfaces (APIs) / Embedding features of Looker and Tableau Desktop
Feature	Looker - Ratings	Tableau Desktop 9.0 64 Ratings
REST API	00 Ratings	9.256 Ratings
Javascript API	00 Ratings	9.051 Ratings
iFrames	00 Ratings	9.249 Ratings
Java API	00 Ratings	10.046 Ratings
Themeable User Interface (UI)	00 Ratings	8.453 Ratings
Customizable Platform (Open Source)	00 Ratings	8.446 Ratings

User Ratings
	Looker	Tableau Desktop
Likelihood to Recommend	8.7 (117 ratings)	8.7 (194 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew	9.5 (7 ratings)	8.9 (39 ratings)
Usability	8.8 (12 ratings)	8.6 (63 ratings)
Availability	10.0 (1 ratings)	8.0 (10 ratings)
Performance	6.0 (1 ratings)	6.1 (9 ratings)
Support Rating	8.8 (14 ratings)	7.0 (56 ratings)
In-Person Training	- (0 ratings)	9.4 (4 ratings)
Online Training	- (0 ratings)	8.0 (4 ratings)
Implementation Rating	10.0 (1 ratings)	8.0 (34 ratings)
Configurability	10.0 (1 ratings)	8.1 (2 ratings)
Contract Terms and Pricing Model	10.0 (1 ratings)	- (0 ratings)
Data Sharing and Collaboration	8.5 (51 ratings)	8.4 (115 ratings)
Data Sources	7.3 (51 ratings)	7.9 (115 ratings)
Ease of integration	10.0 (1 ratings)	10.0 (1 ratings)
Product Scalability	10.0 (1 ratings)	7.0 (3 ratings)
Professional Services	10.0 (1 ratings)	- (0 ratings)
Vendor post-sale	10.0 (1 ratings)	10.0 (1 ratings)
Vendor pre-sale	10.0 (1 ratings)	10.0 (1 ratings)