The Looker Difference

Analytics evolved

We believe everybody should have access to reliable analytics to make data-driven decisions. And to deliver on this promise, we had to reimagine and rebuild how analytics are done from the ground up. Our new approach to analytics builds on the best of what’s come before, combined with a rich flexible data platform that takes advantage of all the latest technology advancements of storing and processing huge amounts of data. This is not just modern BI, this is a modern data platform that can serve the data needs of an entire company.

Unify See the full picture by easily combining data from disparate sources
Old Way	Looker
Reshape your data to fit your tool	Adapt Looker to fit your data
Stale data in your BI tool	Direct connection to any SQL database, so data is always fresh
Brittle physical organization of data in the database	Virtual, code-based schema applied at query-time for flexibility
Data siloed in app-specific databases	Make sense of all your data in one tool

Transform Retain row-level detail and transform your data on the fly. No need for inflexible physical schemas or OLAP cubes
Old Way	Looker
Powerful but disorganized SQL	All the power of SQL, organized and reusable with LookML
ETL: Enforced pre-transformation	ELT: Transform at runtime
OLAP Cubes; Summary tables	Row-level detail

Govern Keep everyone on the same page by centralizing the definitions of your business metrics. Say “goodbye” to the chaos of workbook-based analytics
Old Way	Looker
Everyone imposes their own meaning on the data	Centrally-defined, version-controlled business logic lives in the software for everyone to use
Collaboration is hard, if not impossible	Collaboration and versioning with Git
One developer working on a universe at a time	Every analyst gets their own sandbox. Prototype new work and push to production when you’re ready
No way to audit or roll back to a previous version	Every version of your definitions easily accessible and implementable

Ad-hoc Give everyone in the organization the ability to get reliable, trustworthy, up-to-date answers to their questions—no SQL required.
Old Way	Looker
Only analysts can explore	Everyone across departments can self-serve from curated data
Ad-hoc analysis only available on a small subset of data	Connect directly to the database to explore all your data
Everyone makes up their own definition of metrics	Metrics are defined centrally for everyone to use

Visualize Chart, graph, format, and visually explore your data, right in the same platform that you use to prepare and transform your data
Old Way	Looker
Export data excerpts to specialized visualization tools	Web-native, interactive visualizations across your entire data ecosystem
Hard to share dynamic visualization	Visualizations live in-browser
Dashboards are inflexible and require special tools to update	Business users can drag & drop to create or edit their own dashboards
Limited to tool-supported visualizations	Plug in any custom visualization you can code in D3

Deliver Leverage the value of your data wherever you need it — across the web, on your mobile device, and right in your existing workflows
Old Way	Looker
Sharing is hard	Sharing is as easy as sending the URL to your colleague
Data is locked in your BI tool	Access your data in your existing contexts—in Slack, Salesforce, wherever you need it
Workbook-based desktop applications	100% browser based
Scheduling data delivery is hard or impossible	Everyone can schedule delivery to email, webhooks, chat, S3 or FTP
Export, download locally, upload, then import	Export locally or export directly to Google Drive, Dropbox, S3
BI isn't integrated into the web	Fully embeddable with SSO. Responsive mobile design. Full RESTful API