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Amazon QuickSight vs Looker comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

Amazon QuickSight
Average Rating
7.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.3
Number of Reviews
29
Ranking in other categories
BI (Business Intelligence) Tools (4th)
Looker
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
19
Ranking in other categories
Embedded BI (6th)
 

Mindshare comparison

While both are Business Intelligence solutions, they serve different purposes. Amazon QuickSight is designed for BI (Business Intelligence) Tools and holds a mindshare of 6.3%, down 9.4% compared to last year.
Looker, on the other hand, focuses on Embedded BI, holds 8.9% mindshare, down 12.2% since last year.
BI (Business Intelligence) Tools
Embedded BI
 

Featured Reviews

Mohd Farhan - PeerSpot reviewer
Has seamless data filtering and visualization for client satisfaction
One area for improvement is the cost, as it's a bit expensive. The caching mechanism also charges too much if I need to cache any data. Sometimes it takes time to display data, suggesting a need for enhancement in data visualization speed. Additionally, the role-level security is challenging to implement, and it could be improved to allow access control per department more easily.
Kishore Jhunjhunwala - PeerSpot reviewer
A cloud solution for operational reporting but is expensive
Some basic feature that is available in other reporting tools is missing. Looker has the ability to show more than 5,000 rows for operational reporting. Some reporting tools allow users to scroll down to see more than 5,000 rows, but in Looker, you have to download the entire dataset. Looker should consider adding a scroll-down option to allow users to view large datasets on screen without downloading them. Looker has some options for granting users access as viewers. However, viewers cannot download the entire dataset. Only superusers can download the whole dataset on the Explore screen. This is a big limitation, as you cannot give any user viewer access. You can give access to superuser access, which is a cost to the company.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"Easily able to connect with our other services and easy to manage."
"The solution's most valuable feature is its flexibility to visualize certain logs."
"It works well with the AWS ecosystem."
"The most valuable feature of this solution is the user interface."
"A valuable feature of Amazon QuickSight is that it's a cloud-native service provided by AWS. As all platforms within my company run on AWS, that's the leverage of Amazon QuickSight. Amazon QuickSight is also easy to use, and I find the native connectors from AWS valuable as well."
"The query and dashboard capabilities are entirely good."
"Efficiency has definitely improved, and the speed of developing analytics and insights has increased by at least twenty percent."
"Amazon QuickSight has introduced a new functionality called Q bar, which allows the user to do natural language queries and get additional insights using some built-in generative capabilities."
"We can centralize all our data models."
"The product is easy to use."
"Looker allows you to generate the most optimal SQL queries in a DC through UI actions. We had signed a contract with Google Cloud to use BigQuery. That was the primary reason we adopted Looker. It works better with BigQuery than any other BI platform. We also like how this tool was developed. It was designed with an eye toward microservices architecture."
"It is a pretty stable solution because it is a cloud-based product."
"From a developer's perspective, the way the functionality's being handled is great."
"I would rate the stability a ten out of ten. I didn't face any issues with stability."
"The stability of Looker has been good since I have been using it. However, it depends on what components are being used."
"With Looker, I have experienced benefits in terms of usability and shareability."
 

Cons

"There could be an end-to-end pipeline for data cleaning as well as presenting it using different visualizations."
"Right now, you can't use Amazon QuickSight on other cloud providers, so I'd like it to have availability on other cloud providers. This is an area for improvement in the product. What I'd like to see in Amazon QuickSight in the future is a distributed centralized system where I can manage all reports in one place, and for Amazon QuickSight to become reporting as a service."
"The setup process falls somewhere in the middle. It is not straightforward, nor is it complex, but there is a significant amount of work needed on the back end to make it function."
"You can't tell a data story as well in QuickSight as you can on others, especially in TIBCO Spotfire."
"It's not ideal for reports that are more complex."
"It is a simple tool with limited features. Its visualization set is very limited, and it also has limited functionality. An intelligence tool should not be only for creating reports. Currently, we have to do all computational and mathematical operations outside. We should be able to do such operations in an intelligence tool like this. As an intelligence tool, it should support dynamic refresh. QuickSight currently supports the refresh at a minimum of one hour, and it is not suitable for dynamic dashboards that require frequent refreshes."
"The solution must be more user-friendly."
"Compared to Power BI, I felt QuickSight lacks some features, like delayed drill-downs. Drill-downs were the main area where we found QuickSight lacking."
"The main area of concern in Looker is probably related to blending the data from the different sources, including the data present internally in the company and on the cloud."
"Looker doesn't connect to Excel, which is a huge disappointment because a lot of data is presented in Excel. Also, it can't consume data directly from REST APIs, which is necessary. Looker needs to expand its horizons when it comes to data sources. The inability to connect to different data sources is hampering our use cases. Currently, it only has an ODBC connection that connects to a database. It needs to connect to other data sources, such as Excel, APIs, and different platforms."
"The product does not have documented material."
"The integration with different databases must be improved."
"Stability needs improvement."
"Integrations with other BI tools could be better."
"It needs to be more user-friendly."
"The visualization capability of the product is limited."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The solution is not affordable."
"The standard edition is free to use for exploration purposes while the enterprise edition needs to be paid for. The pricing for this solution is very reasonable."
"A highly affordable cost structure with fixed membership and timeframe basis options."
"The Amazon QuickSight licensing model my company's on is pay-as-you-go, but I wouldn't be able to give the figures because that's handled by the finance department."
"I'm using a paid version of Amazon QuickSight, paying about $22 monthly. As I have yet to learn about the pricing for other tools, such as Power BI, I won't be able to compare."
"Amazon QuickSight charges $250 per user, which becomes expensive when managing multiple departments."
"The pricing is cost-effective with a good plan."
"I wouldn't say that it is an expensive product, but to stay competitive they would need to bring down the prices."
"The price of Looker usually depends on the solution's provider, but it is usually cheaper than the other products in the market. Looker is offered at different prices for different companies."
"It's not cheap, but it's not expensive for big companies."
"Looker is expensive and could be made better by reducing it."
"It is cheap."
"I do not have to make any payments to use the solution."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
15%
Computer Software Company
14%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Government
6%
Financial Services Firm
14%
Computer Software Company
13%
Educational Organization
10%
Manufacturing Company
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Amazon QuickSight?
The integration is very seamless. We stored our result CSV files in S3 and connected directly from there.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Amazon QuickSight?
Amazon QuickSight charges $250 per user, which becomes expensive when managing multiple departments. However, this cost is offset by the advantages it provides.
What needs improvement with Amazon QuickSight?
One area for improvement is the cost, as it's a bit expensive. The caching mechanism also charges too much if I need to cache any data. Sometimes it takes time to display data, suggesting a need fo...
What do you like most about Looker?
With Looker, I have experienced benefits in terms of usability and shareability.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Looker?
I do not have to make any payments to use the solution. In the beginning, Looker may work fine for its users. If advanced users who have experience with BI tools use Looker, then they may find it t...
What needs improvement with Looker?
The visualization capability of the product is limited. From an improvement perspective, the product should have more visualization capability. I can't clean data in Looker, and if I try to do it, ...
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

QuickSight
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

MLB Advanced Media, Infor, HotelBeds, Gemini, Jivochat, Edmunds.com
Yahoo!, Etsy, Kohler, Hipcamp, Hubspot, Kickstarter, Venmo, Dollar Shave Club, 600+ customer
Find out what your peers are saying about Microsoft, Salesforce, SAP and others in BI (Business Intelligence) Tools. Updated: June 2025.
860,592 professionals have used our research since 2012.