Looker vs Microsoft Power BI comparison

"The product is easy to use."

"I would rate the stability a ten out of ten. I didn't face any issues with stability."

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

"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."

"We can centralize all our data models."

"With Looker, I have experienced benefits in terms of usability and shareability."

"The stability of Looker has been good since I have been using it. However, it depends on what components are being used."

"It is a pretty stable solution because it is a cloud-based product."

"It gives you an edge if you are on the Microsoft platform. If you have been using Microsoft products for a long time or if you have the Microsoft infrastructure, this is the right tool for you. It has seamless integration with Microsoft SQL Server and other sources, and you get the best of the three things (SSIS, SSAS, and SSRS) in one suite."

"The solution makes it easy for me to develop reports and publish them."

"Data integration enabled my organization to easily pool data from our varied system into one data warehouse."

"We find the solution offers good stability."

"The solution is easy to set up and implement."

"I find Power BI's reporting feature the most valuable. The solution has improved a lot. There are new features getting added day by day. In the past, they didn't even have the printing feature, but now they have it."

"The DAX coding language is good for creating formulae."

"Its data visualization provides the user the ability to quickly look at data and focus on relevant information, allowing them to make an immediate decision."

"Integrations with other BI tools could be better."

"The product does not have documented material."

"The integration with different databases must be improved."

"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 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."

"It needs to be more user-friendly."

"The visualization capability of the product is limited."

"Stability needs improvement."

"Sluggish performance when handling large amounts of data."

"The visual outlet or the visualization aspect can be improved because the settings piece is quite problematic. It requires a lot of time to set the visuals and check. It is quite fiddly to change all the settings and font sizes. It just needs better ability in terms of using templates or visualization templates to get the vision. Our users always benchmark based on the product, and they don't appreciate everything under the bonnet. The only rating is based on the actual reports in the settings for the dashboard. They should make it look a bit funky and a bit more aesthetically pleasing on the eye. It is quite a fiddly tool, but other than that, it is pretty slick. Because it is community-driven, the marketplace tends to be changing forever. You get the standard visualizations, and you've also got all other marketplace visualizations that require you to spend a bit more money and purchase things in the marketplace. With certain visualizations, there is no longevity. I had used certain visualizations, but they discontinued them, and I had to rebuild my reports, which is obviously very frustrating. There should be some sort of stabilization around how the marketplace visuals impact the users when they expire."

"The accounting data needs improvement."

"I have observed issues regarding stability."

"Most of the dashboarding tools have prebuilt graphs. So, you have to stick with them, unless you are going to use a third-party tool to create them, and then you are going to upload them to the BI tool. In Power BI, they started supporting this functionality and created a tool for that, but it isn't yet complete and mature. It is still exceeding the expectations and is better than most of the BI tools when it comes to creating custom graphs, but it needs more enhancement and simplification. It would be good to have a design tool provided by Power BI to design the graphs that we want and set the figures that we want on them."

"The real-time data refresh capabilities is one of the things I had issues with"

"This solution needs integration with SAS and more deep analysis functionality."

"It has come a long way in terms of how it was working two years ago, but there are some things that you still can't do with it. For example, permission management and user access management are still a bit limited. It is basically based on the idea that everybody from the organization can see everything or limit the type of data they can see. If I want you to see only one report and the other guy to see another report, I can't do it. There should be a better way to manage permissions and users. It should also support external users much better."

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

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

"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."

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

"It is cheap."

"Costs less than most competing solutions."

"MS BI comes with all the tools and it is, to the best of my knowledge, the most affordable solution."

"No comment."

"I have never worked on licensing, but I have heard that it is reasonable."

"Its pricing is great."

"Downloading Power BI Desktop is free."

"The current licensing model that Microsoft BI has is expensive. My customers have told me the cost is approximately $20 per user and this can get expensive fast. There should be a one-time purchase option if the customer has a lot of users."

"In general, Microsoft BI's price is lower compared to Alteryx."