Looker vs. ThoughtSpot

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
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
ThoughtSpot
Score 8.2 out of 10
N/A
ThoughtSpot is an Agentic Analytics Platform for enterprises where users ask data questions using natural language and get answers with AI. Code-first for data teams and code-free for business users, ThoughtSpot can handle large, complex cloud data at scale.
$50
per month (billed annually) per user (25-1000 users)
Pricing
LookerThoughtSpot
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
Thoughtspot Analytics - Pro
$50
per month (billed annually) per user (25-1000 users)
Thoughtspot Analytics - Enterprise
Custom
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
LookerThoughtSpot
Free Trial
YesYes
Free/Freemium Version
NoYes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeRequiredOptional
Additional DetailsMust contact sales team for pricing.
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
LookerThoughtSpot
Considered Both Products
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.
ThoughtSpot
Chose ThoughtSpot
I think PBI was terribly slow and clunky. UI was outdated. Solution was expensive for what we needed. ThoughtSpot was worlds different (in a better way).
Chose ThoughtSpot
They’re for different use cases. When I want a dynamic way to quickly obtain the data I need, I’d go with ThoughtSpot.
Chose ThoughtSpot
It is more flexible and PowerBI, easier work online, and share information with many users. Also the dashboards and beautiful, and the user experience is better. Performance used to be faster.

We use Looker for different use cases but, when it comes to reporting and sharing …
Chose ThoughtSpot
ThoughtSpot's user friendly interface, faster and accurate results, low-code support for building insights and vast availability of native charts, AI powered dashboards helps in faster decision making and helps in driving better business results. The mobile APP that ThoughtSpot …
Chose ThoughtSpot
It is more cost effective when compared to Tableau and more easy to use. ThoughtSpot integrates well with modern cloud data platforms like Snowflake, Google, and Bigquery, making it easy to analyze large datasets in real time. Sync insights into cloud tools. Users can sync …
Chose ThoughtSpot
ThoughtSpot provided a twist on the typical Analytics / report builder interface. The natural language query building is just so much easier to use.
Chose ThoughtSpot
ThoughtSpot is easy to build charts and it is probably the easiest tool to build things quickly. The quality of the charts is middle if not lower pack compared to others. The dbt integration is wildly oversold and does not add any value.
Chose ThoughtSpot
ThoughtSpot can handle large datasets A LOT better.
Chose ThoughtSpot
ThoughtSpot was much easier from an end-user perspective. Looker and Tableau allowed for more customization and detailed dashboards.
Chose ThoughtSpot
Thoughtspot is a fairly new tool when compared to Tableau. I'll just list the benefits of each one of threse below -
Tableau -
1. Much more customizable the Thoughtspot
Chose ThoughtSpot
Have not used as much, tried ThoughtSpot out for the first time for evaluation and testing purposes to see if this type of software would be helpful.
Chose ThoughtSpot
we were looking for something which provides self service capabilities and something which very eay to use from users perspective.
Chose ThoughtSpot
I liked thought spot because of the ad-hoc capabilities and their search functionality.
Chose ThoughtSpot
ThoughtSpot is more powerful of a tool than something like QlikView or QlikSense with the correct training.
Chose ThoughtSpot
ThoughtSpot is my top choice from the above two as the UI is the most modern and user-friendly as well.
Chose ThoughtSpot
ThoughtSpot is the leader in embedded analytics and is much easier to work with massive volumes of data. None of the other tools listed had both of those functionalities, which were most important to us. There are other features that they have such as easier drill down, …
Chose ThoughtSpot
much more extensible and much easier to embed
Chose ThoughtSpot
Compare to Kibana, which was we used previously, ThoughtSpot is definitely better in terms of UI, visualizations, usability, and the SpotIQ/ML components. The only disadvantage for ThoughtSpot is the lack of drill-down function/click-on filters.
Chose ThoughtSpot
The main reason for selecting Thoughtspot was to share reporting with other external vendors and ease of doing business.
Chose ThoughtSpot
We have been using tableau as the enterprise reporting tool and felt sending data to external people had few restrictions hence we tried with ThoughtSpot.
Chose ThoughtSpot
ThoughtSpot can similarly generate tables, visuals, and dashboards in Tableau, but in a faster and easier way.
Chose ThoughtSpot
We liked the support we were getting in the sales process (this has continued to be fantastic), I personally knew several people in the company. In the pilot we ran, our devs enjoyed working with ThoughtSpot.
Chose ThoughtSpot
We have multiple BI Applications that are used based on the needs of the different business users.
Chose ThoughtSpot
We selected ThoughtSpot with the promise that it would evolve into a Google search for business insights. To date, it has not gotten close in my opinion.
Features
LookerThoughtSpot
BI Standard Reporting
Comparison of BI Standard Reporting features of Product A and Product B
Looker
8.6
Ratings
5% above category average
ThoughtSpot
7.6
Ratings
7% below category average
Pixel Perfect reports8.60 Ratings6.00 Ratings
Customizable dashboards8.90 Ratings9.00 Ratings
Report Formatting Templates8.30 Ratings7.70 Ratings
Ad-hoc Reporting
Comparison of Ad-hoc Reporting features of Product A and Product B
Looker
8.4
Ratings
4% above category average
ThoughtSpot
7.7
Ratings
5% below category average
Drill-down analysis8.10 Ratings9.00 Ratings
Formatting capabilities7.80 Ratings7.60 Ratings
Integration with R or other statistical packages8.70 Ratings5.40 Ratings
Report sharing and collaboration9.10 Ratings8.80 Ratings
Report Output and Scheduling
Comparison of Report Output and Scheduling features of Product A and Product B
Looker
8.7
Ratings
5% above category average
ThoughtSpot
8.8
Ratings
6% above category average
Publish to Web8.30 Ratings8.50 Ratings
Publish to PDF9.00 Ratings9.40 Ratings
Report Versioning8.50 Ratings7.90 Ratings
Report Delivery Scheduling9.10 Ratings9.10 Ratings
Delivery to Remote Servers00 Ratings9.00 Ratings
Data Discovery and Visualization
Comparison of Data Discovery and Visualization features of Product A and Product B
Looker
6.9
Ratings
14% below category average
ThoughtSpot
8.0
Ratings
0% above category average
Pre-built visualization formats (heatmaps, scatter plots etc.)8.00 Ratings7.80 Ratings
Location Analytics / Geographic Visualization8.00 Ratings8.80 Ratings
Predictive Analytics4.60 Ratings8.00 Ratings
Pattern Recognition and Data Mining00 Ratings7.60 Ratings
Access Control and Security
Comparison of Access Control and Security features of Product A and Product B
Looker
8.2
Ratings
3% below category average
ThoughtSpot
8.5
Ratings
0% above category average
Multi-User Support (named login)8.70 Ratings8.60 Ratings
Role-Based Security Model8.10 Ratings8.50 Ratings
Multiple Access Permission Levels (Create, Read, Delete)8.00 Ratings8.40 Ratings
Report-Level Access Control8.10 Ratings8.30 Ratings
Single Sign-On (SSO)00 Ratings8.60 Ratings
Mobile Capabilities
Comparison of Mobile Capabilities features of Product A and Product B
Looker
6.1
Ratings
25% below category average
ThoughtSpot
7.5
Ratings
5% below category average
Responsive Design for Web Access7.40 Ratings7.20 Ratings
Mobile Application5.00 Ratings7.30 Ratings
Dashboard / Report / Visualization Interactivity on Mobile7.20 Ratings7.00 Ratings
Application Program Interfaces (APIs) / Embedding
Comparison of Application Program Interfaces (APIs) / Embedding features of Product A and Product B
Looker
-
Ratings
ThoughtSpot
6.6
Ratings
17% below category average
REST API00 Ratings5.30 Ratings
Javascript API00 Ratings4.90 Ratings
iFrames00 Ratings8.30 Ratings
Java API00 Ratings7.00 Ratings
Themeable User Interface (UI)00 Ratings7.10 Ratings
Customizable Platform (Open Source)00 Ratings7.10 Ratings
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LookerThoughtSpot
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User Ratings
LookerThoughtSpot
Likelihood to Recommend
8.7
(0 ratings)
8.4
(0 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
9.5
(0 ratings)
10.0
(0 ratings)
Usability
8.8
(0 ratings)
8.6
(0 ratings)
Availability
10.0
(0 ratings)
9.0
(0 ratings)
Performance
6.0
(0 ratings)
8.0
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
8.8
(0 ratings)
8.0
(0 ratings)
In-Person Training
-
(0 ratings)
5.0
(0 ratings)
Online Training
-
(0 ratings)
4.0
(0 ratings)
Implementation Rating
10.0
(0 ratings)
7.0
(0 ratings)
Configurability
10.0
(0 ratings)
8.0
(0 ratings)
Ease of integration
10.0
(0 ratings)
9.0
(0 ratings)
Product Scalability
10.0
(0 ratings)
8.0
(0 ratings)
Vendor post-sale
10.0
(0 ratings)
8.0
(0 ratings)
Vendor pre-sale
10.0
(0 ratings)
9.0
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
LookerThoughtSpot
Likelihood to Recommend
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
Read full review
By using the power of cloud platforms like bigquery or snowflake, ThoughtSpot can deliver performance at scale ensuring that even the largest organization can quickly analyze and visualize data. The ability to seamlessly share live dashboards fosters collaborations, ensuring everyone in the organization is working from the same data source and aligned in decision making.
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Pros
  • 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.
Read full review
  • Beautiful visualizations. The visuals are distinct, clean, and easy to discern from one another.
  • Intelligent querying functionality. When looking to manipulate the data, the search function makes it easy to manipulate the features in the data, along with aggregating them in the way you'd like.
  • Embedding! It has been a smooth process thus far for our product & technical teams to work with ThoughtSpot and bring it into our product.
Read full review
Cons
  • 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.
Read full review
  • It would be great if ThoughtSpot can add the feature to filter by clicking on visualizations. i.e if I click on a particular data point in the chart if the full dashboard can filter just for that particular data point.
  • Color coding the heatmap with different colors like green to orange to red.
Read full review
Likelihood to Renew
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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We have had success with the initial use cases and there are more use cases that can receive return on investment. I don't give it a 10 because other products like Tableau are building functionality that may start to compete in the coming years.
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Usability
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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The tool is easy to use if you know what you are doing and looking for. I know as they work towards improvements and simple language it will become even easier, but as of now they are doing a great job but there is room for improvement.
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Reliability and Availability
No objections
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it's available unless there is a server or system update etc. sometimes the timing of this is bad (for example during a month end close)
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Performance
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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It does what it is supposed to. Would be nice to have a bit more insights
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Support Rating
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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I give it this meeting because the team is not only help able to help us in the current solutions but also amazing and taking feedback and feeding it back to their development team which includes more products and features into ThoughtSpot
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In-Person Training
No answers on this topic
inhouse in-person training. Took a bit to long to get the basics.
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Online Training
No answers on this topic
poor instructions
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Implementation Rating
Very satisfied, easy to implement
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Understand use case and model and design accordingly
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Alternatives Considered
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.
Read full review
It is more flexible and PowerBI, easier work online, and share information with many users. Also the dashboards and beautiful, and the user experience is better. Performance used to be faster. We use Looker for different use cases but, when it comes to reporting and sharing information, ThoughSpot is much better.
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Scalability
No answers on this topic
Because it is very reliable, inside the situation, we need strong internet connection to access a lot of data but easily never had any downtime except during the upgrades
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Return on Investment
  • 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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  • Time to market ROI is massive vs hiring the full-time dedicated team to build and maintain a frontend multi-tenant SaaS data viz product.
  • It will be interesting to see over time how the advanced features play out in terms of usability and end value, such as Natural Search, which we are very excited about, and the machine learning tools.
Read full review
ScreenShots

Looker Screenshots

Screenshot of a Looker dashboard with a geo chart.

ThoughtSpot Screenshots

Screenshot of the ThoughtSpot home screenScreenshot of SpotIQ, which offers AI-driven insightsScreenshot of the Spotter AI agent that surfaces insights through natural language queriesScreenshot of AI Assist producing SQL in real timeScreenshot of SpotIQ, which offers AI-driven insightsScreenshot of the integration with dbt models and metrics