Looker vs Microsoft Power BI comparison

The compared Google and Microsoft solutions aren't in the same category. Google is ranked #10 in EBT , and holds a 6.4% mindshare in the category. Microsoft is ranked #1 in BIT , with an average rating of 8.1, and holds a 9.3% mindshare. Additionally, 80% of Google users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 93% of Microsoft users who would recommend it.

Looker

Read 19 Looker reviews

2,532 Views
1,013 Comparison Views

80% willing to recommend

Microsoft Power BI

Read 329 Microsoft Power BI reviews

24,257 Views
15,524 Comparison Views

93% willing to recommend

Looker

Microsoft Power BI

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Download the report

Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between Looker and Microsoft Power BI based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out what your peers are saying about Salesforce, Qlik, MicroStrategy and others in Embedded BI.

To learn more, read our detailed Embedded BI Report (Updated: February 2026).

Buyer's Guide

Embedded BI

February 2026

Download the complete report

Helped 884,873 peers since 2012

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

Looker

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

7.0

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Embedded BI (10th)

Microsoft Power BI

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

6.7

Number of Reviews

329

Ranking in other categories

BI (Business Intelligence) Tools (1st), Reporting (1st)

Mindshare comparison

While both are Business Intelligence solutions, they serve different purposes. Looker is designed for Embedded BI and holds a mindshare of 6.4%, down 9.0% compared to last year.
Microsoft Power BI, on the other hand, focuses on BI (Business Intelligence) Tools, holds 9.3% mindshare, down 21.8% since last year.

Embedded BI Mindshare Distribution
Product	Mindshare (%)
Looker	6.4%
Tableau Enterprise	17.6%
Qlik Sense	8.6%
Other	67.4%

Embedded BI

BI (Business Intelligence) Tools Mindshare Distribution
Product	Mindshare (%)
Microsoft Power BI	9.3%
Tableau Enterprise	6.7%
Amazon QuickSight	3.7%
Other	80.3%

BI (Business Intelligence) Tools

Featured Reviews

Kishore Jhunjhunwala

Sr Analytics Consultant at a outsourcing company with 1,001-5,000 employees

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.

Read full review

Antonio Flor

Lead Anaplanner at Chaucer Group

Data integration has improved reserving and expense control while collaboration drives fast dashboards

Regarding drawbacks or weak points in Microsoft Power BI, it may not be directly related to the tool itself, but with our architecture, as we couldn't get a service account, which is an email address that has no relationship with the employees, just to establish the connection with Anaplan. We couldn't get it to work on SSO, so we use an employee account which could be a point of weakness, meaning if the person leaves, that connection will break. If the person goes on holiday and we need to refresh, we have to change the connection as well, but we have to live with that since we're not using SSO on the service account. Regarding the natural language processing feature, we're trying to avoid using it too much because it can slow down the connection, so as much as possible, we try to build the logic and any transformation in Anaplan, and then deliver an end product to Microsoft Power BI.

Read full review

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"It's quite effortless to navigate through various applications and review their updated data in real-time."

"In the past, adding a new dashboard to our product was a multi-week development effort, now our nontechnical product management and client success teams can create, launch, and maintain high quality dashboards with no interruption to the development team."

"The most valuable features are the ability to create visualizations for non-technical employees, as well as the ability to provide ways to dynamically slice the data."

"We LOVE Looker here at Snagajob."

"The product is easy to use."

"From a developer's perspective, the way the functionality's being handled is great."

"Looker is an extremely valuable product that can really transform your company's ability to use data to answer challenging questions."

"We can centralize all our data models."

More Looker pros

"Data integration is very useful in Power BI. It lets me collect data from many sources. For example, I can get data from Oracle databases and SQL Server databases at the same time."

"The most valuable feature is shareability, where we can publish work to the cloud and share it with team members."

"It is very good, and it supports the Microsoft ecosystem, including Excel, etc."

"Its visualization capabilities are pretty good. It is very easy to use. You can easily make your dashboard."

"The best thing about this solution is that it is very user friendly. It is interactive in terms of visualizations. It is very eye-catching, and it attracts users. There are a lot of options to visualize the data in different drafts and views. I have used different visualization tools, and I found Power BI to be more efficient in terms of performance, user-friendliness, and ease of use."

"The solution's initial setup isn't too complicated."

"It is stable enough. It has a lot of powerful functions. It can also be customized with the DAX language. It is also intuitive enough and incremental. You can start with something simple, and then step-by-step, you can increase the reports and dashboards according to your needs."

"In the early stage of an implementation, it not only helps decision making, but it allows people to have insight into problems with data so that they can go and get it corrected."

More Microsoft Power BI pros

Cons

"Features related to visualization should continue to be improved."

"This product is useful for non-technical users, who are able to use the interface to easily slice data. But for the admin users who are responsible for maintaining the schemas and files behind the scenes, it can easily become a chore, as there is a lot of manual work involved in defining the schemas of the connected database(s), as well as any refactored tables; the restrictive syntax also makes maintenance difficult."

"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."

"Stability needs improvement."

"Their needs to be much more control of visualizations to become more on par with Tableau."

"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."

"The integration with different databases must be improved."

"The pricing model makes sense, but can be very expensive, potentially prohibitively so for smaller companies."

More Looker cons

"People without private emails cannot publish and, frankly, this doesn't allow for easy training."

"The product doesn't support unstructured data. It doesn't support video, streaming, and strings of files."

"Power BI's drillthrough feature could be improved. I didn't like drillthrough and those options much, but I did like it in MicroStrategy."

"The reporting part of Microsoft BI is rather limited compared to other reporting tools."

"Although there are many visualizations, most of them are paid separately because they have been developed by private developers. The visualizations that come off the shelf are quite few."

"The performance of Microsoft BI could improve for large datasets and it would be beneficial to have more visualization features."

"For someone who is new, I think that Power BI can be a little complicated."

"There are certain features that are only available in the cloud version. It would be beneficial if they could be brought down to the on-premise version without the necessity of using the enterprise SQL database, as that can be very costly. We need more cost-effective features that are available in the cloud to be accessible on-premise."

More Microsoft Power BI cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."

"I do not have to make any payments to use the solution."

"It is cheap."

"Looker is expensive and could be made better by reducing it."

"It's not cheap, but it's not expensive for big companies."

"The cost of this product is very low, at approximately $8 or $9 per month for a developer."

"Costs less than most competing solutions."

"Microsoft BI is very cost-effective and this is why we use it."

"The pricing is reasonable."

"Their price is good."

"The pricing is very reasonable compared to any other tool."

"All in all, for the price, this is an excellent tool for helping your organization turn mounds of data into useful insights."

"Compared to what's available on the market, I think we pay a fair price."

More Microsoft Power BI pricing and cost advice

See which vendors are best for you

Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Embedded BI solutions are best for your needs.

See recommendations

884,873 professionals have used our research since 2012.

Comparison Review

it_user79932

Senior Manager - BI Head with 5,001-10,000 employees

Feb 4, 2015

Comparison of SAP BO, Tableau, QlikView, Cognos, Microsoft, OBIEE and Pentaho

1. SAP BO/BI Enterprise scalability Security Ease of use Semantic layer 2. Tableau Visualization Data discovery Turnaround time 3. IBM Cognos Enterprise scalability Security In-memory feature 4. MS BI - Flexibility 5. Pentaho - Open source but still enterprise grade 6. QlikView Data…

Read full review

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

14%

Retailer

Computer Software Company

Media Company

Financial Services Firm

12%

Manufacturing Company

Government

Computer Software Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	5
Midsize Enterprise	8
Large Enterprise	6

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	135
Midsize Enterprise	58
Large Enterprise	166

Questions from the Community

Ask a question

Earn 20 points

Seeking lightweight open source BI software

There are many...It would rather depend what System BI architecture or Enterprise legacy you have at your end...I would recommend as follows: 1) If you have legacies of SAP, Oracle - look for SAP...

See all answers

Is Power BI a complete platform or only a visualization tool?

Power BI is an advanced visualization tool oriented to big data with a very complete set of widgets to visualize information, control users accessing information, the configuration of governance po...

See all answers

How does Oracle OBIEE compare with Microsoft BI?

Oracle OBIEE is great in allowing design and creativity per the individual needs of the organization. Dashboards are fully customizable and very user-friendly. This solution is very stable. Oracle ...

See all answers

Comparisons

Tableau Enterprise vs Looker

Compared 13% of the time

Databricks vs Looker

Compared 9% of the time

MicroStrategy vs Looker

Compared 8% of the time

ThoughtSpot vs Looker

Compared 7% of the time

Qlik Sense vs Looker

Compared 6% of the time

More Looker Competitors

Amazon QuickSight vs Microsoft Power BI

Compared 17% of the time

Tableau Enterprise vs Microsoft Power BI

Compared 14% of the time

Domo vs Microsoft Power BI

Compared 8% of the time

Databricks vs Microsoft Power BI

Compared 2% of the time

SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform vs Microsoft Power BI

Compared 2% of the time

More Microsoft Power BI Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Looker

March 2026

Download Looker product report

Buyer's Guide

Microsoft Power BI

March 2026

Download Microsoft Power BI product report

Also Known As

No data available

SSRS, SSAS, MSBI, MS Reporting Services, Microsoft BI Tools, Microsoft Big Data, Power BI Pro, MS BI

Overview

Looker is a powerful data analytics platform that empowers businesses to explore and analyze their data in real time.

With its intuitive interface and robust features, Looker enables users to easily create and share interactive dashboards, reports, and visualizations.

The product's advanced data modeling capabilities and seamless integration with popular data sources make it a top choice for organizations looking to gain valuable insights from their data.

Google

Microsoft Power BI is a powerful tool for data analysis and visualization. This tool stands out for its ability to merge and analyze data from various sources. Widely adopted across different industries and departments, Power BI is instrumental in creating visually appealing dashboards and generating insightful business intelligence reports. Its intuitive interface, robust visualization capabilities, and seamless integration with other Microsoft applications empower users to easily create interactive reports and gain valuable insights.

Microsoft

Sample Customers

Yahoo!, Etsy, Kohler, Hipcamp, Hubspot, Kickstarter, Venmo, Dollar Shave Club, 600+ customer

Accenture Adidas Aetna AIG Airbus Alibaba Allstate Amazon American Express Aon AT&T Audi Bank of America BASF Bayer Berkshire Hathaway Boeing Coca-Cola Comcast Cisco Coca-Cola Dell Disney Emirates Equinix FedEx Ford GE Google H&M Home Depot Honda IBM Intel JPMorgan Chase Kellogg's Kroger L'Oréal McDonald's Merck MetLife Microsoft Nike Oracle P&G PepsiCo Procter & Gamble Prudential Financial SAP Siemens Snapchat Spotify Starbucks Target Toyota T-Mobile Unilever Visa Walmart WeWork World Bank Xerox

Find out what your peers are saying about Salesforce, Qlik, MicroStrategy and others in Embedded BI. Updated: February 2026.

DOWNLOAD NOW

884,873 professionals have used our research since 2012.

We monitor all Embedded BI reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.