Looker vs Tableau

Differences Between Looker vs Tableau

Looker is a data-discovery platform that helps companies make better business decisions through real-time access to data. No matter the size, data can be analyzed within Looker’s 100% in-database and browser-based platform. Looker analytics integrates with any SQL database or data warehouses, such as Amazon Athena, Green plum and Microsoft Azure SQL Data Warehouse. Tableau offers robust BI tools that enhance data visualization and discovery for all types of organizations and business users. With simple drag-and-drop features, users easily analyze key data, share critical insights across the enterprise, and create innovative visualizations and reports. In addition, Tableau offers the option to embed dashboards into existing business applications such as Jive, SharePoint, and Salesforce.

Business Intelligence

Business Intelligence leverages software and service to transform data into actionable intelligence that helps an organization to make out strategic and tactical business solutions. BI involves the process of collaborating tools, applications and methodologies for collecting the data involved analyzing it and execute queries which result in reports and data visualization structures.

Importance of Business Intelligence

• Accelerating and improving decision-making
• Improve sales and negotiations
• Identify new opportunities
• Develop efficiency
• Optimizing internal business processes
• Increasing operational efficiency
• Driving new revenues
• Gaining a competitive advantage over business rivals.
• Make fact-based decisions

Data Visualisation

A picture speaks a thousand data points. And representing these informative data points in a graphical manner is called Data visualization. These graphical representations portray the significance and implications of the data in a clear and effective manner.

Importance of Data Visualisation:

• Depicts data to be more accessible and less confusing.
• Outliers can be speckled with less effort.
• Even large Information can be consumed by the audience with ease.
• Unknown correlations and relationships within data can be discovered
• Kick the need for data scientists.

Head to Head Comparison Between Looker and Tableau (Infographics)

Below are the top 11 comparison Looker and Tableau:

Key Comparison Performance Between Looker and Tableau

Below are the lists of points, describe the key Differences Between Looker andTableau:

• Data collection, storage, and access

Both the Looker and Tableau tools do not offer data collection and storage but we can connect to the data sources like SQL from either of the tools and access data. In-ground tableau provides support for a large number of data sources compared to looker.

• Data Modeling

Data modeling is the process of taking raw data as input cleaned, combined, converted and made ready for data analysis. data modeling can be carried out in ad hoc or publish all these data models in a platform.

When it comes to data modeling Looker’s LookML data modeling layer is its core strength with a wider margin.

• Data Visualisation

Looker provides data visualization features, channeling numbers into charts and graphs. These are displayed in various real-time dashboards that users can check at a glance. And Looker’s integration with products from companies like Google and Amazon Web Services makes it even more powerful. Numerous vendor tools and applications parse and store data in particular ways, but Looker is seen as a leader in the process of taking in raw data and refining it.

Tableau can visualize all types of data, from revenue growth to weather patterns. Its customizable visualization software allows users to create dynamic visualizations that help tell the data story.

• Self Service BI

Looker offers all of your business users self-service capabilities. Whenever a user needs to see it and analyze it,  he can see and analyze it. Additionally, you can provide external self-service access to your dashboards and other data, visualized or not.

The self-service business intelligence component that Tableau brings to the table is also pretty powerful. All of your users, no matter what their background, can act as a data scientist. A drag-and-drop interface makes analyzing your data simple when using the Tableau system. And the self-service capabilities don’t provide surface analysis. The analytics allow your users to get down into the nitty-gritty details of their data if they so choose, so they can find the insights that they’re trying to find.

• Deployment

Deployment isn’t the biggest determinant of a BI vendor’s value, but it does matter for businesses thinking of adopting one. Tableau offers several different products, of which there are various deployments. Tableau Desktop and Tableau Server are both on-premise, using your business’ servers. Tableau Online, as the name suggests, is a web-based platform operating in the cloud. Looker, on the other hand, has an exclusively cloud-based deployment.

Looker and Tableau Comparisons by Business

Below is the comparison table between Looker and Tableau.

Comparison by Business	Tableau	Looker
Cost	35$	By Quote
Price Scheme	Onetime payment / Online subscription	Quote based
Languages	English	English / Dutch
Customer Types	Large Enterprises / Medium enterprises	Small Business/Large Enterprises / Medium Enterprises

Looker vs Tableau Comparison by Features

Below is the Comparison Between Looker vs Tableau

Tableau	Looker
Toggle view and drag and drop	Browser-based Interface and customizable dashboards
Embedded and Shared dashboards	Easy to build dashboards that work on any device
Uses Tableau Reader for data viewing	Uses Fully customizable and exportable reports, charts and graphs
Translate queries to visualizations	Extensible modeling language (LookLM) defines the dimensions and measures
Import all ranges and sizes of data	Live connection to any SQL database on any infrastructure
String insights into a guided story	Modern IDE for agile development and embellishment
Metadata management, Automatic updates and security permissions in any level	Powerful tools for real-time data exploration and collaboration

Conclusion

In summary, the platform you select is going to be highly dependent on your future vision, your data strategy, and your business users’ needs. Before any tool selections, defining that future state with a data strategy is very important. In consideration, Looker is different and but provides a full semantic model for governance and a single source of the truth, as well as power sharing and exploration capabilities. Tableau blows the competition out of the water when it comes to visualization and ease of use. At the end of the day, however, Tableau is only a visualization tool — not an analytics platform.

So if your business prefers or is required to use on-premise software, you’ll need to go with Tableau. Otherwise, you can take a look at both Looker and Tableau solutions.

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