Looker vs Tableau Enterprise comparison

Google and Salesforce are both solutions in the Embedded BI category. Google is ranked #9, while Salesforce is ranked #1 with an average rating of 8.2. Google holds a 6.4% mindshare in EBT, compared to Salesforce’s 17.9% mindshare. Additionally, 80% of Google users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 90% of Salesforce users who would recommend it.

Looker

Read 19 Looker reviews

2,435 Views
901 Comparison Views

80% willing to recommend

Tableau Enterprise

Read 309 Tableau Enterprise reviews

19,124 Views
2,869 Comparison Views

90% willing to recommend

Looker

Tableau Enterprise

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Nov 9, 2025

Tableau Enterprise and Looker compete in the business intelligence and data visualization market. Tableau seems to have the upper hand in visualization capabilities and user friendliness, while Looker shines in data modeling and integration.

Features: Tableau is strong in graphical representation, offering interactive visualizations and seamless integration with varied data sources. Its drag-and-drop interface simplifies report creation. Looker excels with its LookML for data modeling, providing centralized data models, and is favored for its powerful analytical tools.

Room for Improvement: Tableau can enhance its handling of ETL processes and integration of complex datasets. Users note its high costs and suggest performance scalability improvements. Looker's visualization options and ease of use could be better, and expanding integrations would help it rival Tableau more closely.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Tableau is versatile in deployment, available on-premises, cloud, or hybrid environments, and benefits from strong community support. Looker focuses on public cloud usage, offering ease of deployment but needing improvement in customer support availability.

Pricing and ROI: Tableau's higher price is a concern for smaller businesses, but its advanced features and integrations offer considerable ROI when fully utilized. Looker, though also costly, is seen as competitively priced for large enterprises, providing significant value aligning with market expectations.

To learn more, read our detailed Looker vs. Tableau Enterprise Report (Updated: December 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Looker vs. Tableau Enterprise

December 2025

Download the complete report

Helped 881,733 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

Ranking in Embedded BI

9th

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

7.0

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Tableau Enterprise

Ranking in Embedded BI

1st

Average Rating

8.4

Reviews Sentiment

6.1

Number of Reviews

309

Ranking in other categories

BI (Business Intelligence) Tools (2nd), Reporting (2nd), Data Visualization (1st)

Mindshare comparison

As of February 2026, in the Embedded BI category, the mindshare of Looker is 6.4%, down from 9.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Tableau Enterprise is 17.9%, down from 34.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Embedded BI Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
Tableau Enterprise	17.9%
Looker	6.4%
Other	75.7%

Embedded BI

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

Uzair Faruqi

Head Of Analytics at Mjunction Services

Ease of developing dashboards and receiving strong technical support have enabled efficient data visualization

Introducing custom features, such as NLP-based reports, is not very good in Tableau. My MD has been asking us for a way to write in natural language to request reports that the system should generate, but that isn't very effective with Tableau. As a developer, I can develop an on-demand report in Python quite easily, but exposing a REST API on the Tableau platform is not a very easy task. AI enablement is an area for improvement for Tableau, and that is something they might have to work upon. I have heard that ThoughtSpot is quite better in this regard, but the cost of ThoughtSpot is much higher. ThoughtSpot has lots of natural language-based report generation features that Tableau lacks.

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

"The product is easy to use."

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

"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."

"We can centralize all our data models."

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

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

More Looker pros

"The dashboards are amazing, with different report types and stunning visuals. Most importantly, Tableau's AI with machine learning automatically predicts features and reports based on historical data. These are the three most valuable features for me."

"It is easy to adapt visualizers to have interactive conversations among decision-makers."

"Since Tableau is on the cloud, we haven't faced any challenges around scalability."

"Tableau is quite easy to develop dashboards with, and the range of dashboards is good."

"Tableau is easy to use and it has great predictive features."

"The use of a storyboard helps the flow of the data visualisation."

"The best thing I like about Tableau is that you don't have to go for creating; it is calculated free."

"We found Tableau has the quickest learning time out of the few other BI reporting tools that we have used."

More Tableau Enterprise pros

Cons

"The visualization capability of the product is limited."

"Integrations with other BI tools could be better."

"Stability needs improvement."

"The integration with different databases must be improved."

"It needs to be more user-friendly."

"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."

"The product does not have documented material."

"Provide additional enhancements in any business process: Operations, Marketing and Sales, Finance, Human Resources, Logistics, etc."

"A strict security measure is needed. I believe it is weak in terms of security."

"I would like the solution to have certain features allowing the delivery of reports to the email."

"I would like Tableau to handle geospatial data better in terms of multiple layers and shapefiles."

"They need to improve the icons and the filters, because they look too old, resembling Excel from 1997."

"It should offer better features for customization."

"When compared to Power BI, it is less user-friendly."

"I find data prepping in Tableau challenging to understand, perhaps because I am new to it. It sometimes requires extensive investigation to determine why the data does not appear correctly."

More Tableau Enterprise cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."

"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."

"We pay for the enterprise license for Tableau. The licensing could be cheaper and more flexible."

"Tableau is an expensive solution compared to Power BI."

"For big business, Tableau could be expensive as having a lot of Tableau server users (entering with a browser to reports) could be a bit expensive."

"ROI is very high, but it requires a data preparation/blending tool."

"The pricing of Tableau should be better to remain competitive in the market, especially when compared to alternatives."

"Tableau is a little cheaper as compared to Power BI and other technologies that we have used in the past. However, if the business users in our organization want to make presentations, Tableau has been asking us to purchase a Tableau Creator license, and $35 per month is expensive for business users. Power BI is giving a free desktop version for business users to connect to any data source and build their own dashboards. That's why we have proposed to use Power BI for most of the business users in our organization."

"Cost is where tools like MicroStrategy, Power BI, or Spotfire come into play. Cost-wise, Tableau is a little bit costlier than other tools such as Power BI. I have been using Tableau all these years, but about four years ago, Power BI came out at a very low cost. Their desktop version was free from the beginning. Power BI Desktop has always been free, whereas Tableau Desktop is costly. When it comes to cost, people prefer Power BI because it integrates very well with Office 365. You don't have to worry about integration with Teams or SharePoint."

"In Korea, the tool's pricing depends on the scale of usage. For instance, it's reasonable for a department with fewer than 50 users to adopt Tableau, like sales. However, the pricing becomes an issue when considering an enterprise solution for a larger user base, say 10,000 people."

More Tableau Enterprise pricing and cost advice

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Comparison Review

it_user6330

Product Manager at a retailer with 10,001+ employees

May 2, 2013

MicroStrategy vs. Tableau

After a recent presentation, several attendees asked me about the applications of Visual Insights and Tableau. Many companies are investing in both tools and are trying to figure out the right tool for specific applications Tableau has found its sweet-spot as an agile discovery tool that analysts…

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

14%

Computer Software Company

Retailer

Media Company

Financial Services Firm

14%

Computer Software Company

10%

Manufacturing Company

University

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	117
Midsize Enterprise	67
Large Enterprise	184

Questions from the Community

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Both tools have their positives and negatives. First, I should mention that I am relatively new to Tableau. I have been working on and off Tableau for about a year, but getting to work on it consta...

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Comparisons

Microsoft Power BI vs Looker

Compared 13% of the time

Databricks vs Looker

Compared 11% of the time

MicroStrategy vs Looker

Compared 9% of the time

ThoughtSpot vs Looker

Compared 7% of the time

Qlik Sense vs Looker

Compared 7% of the time

More Looker Competitors

Microsoft Power BI vs Tableau Enterprise

Compared 17% of the time

Domo vs Tableau Enterprise

Compared 7% of the time

Amazon QuickSight vs Tableau Enterprise

Compared 4% of the time

Julius AI vs Tableau Enterprise

Compared 3% of the time

More Tableau Enterprise Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Looker

January 2026

Download Looker product report

Buyer's Guide

Tableau Enterprise

January 2026

Download Tableau Enterprise product report

Also Known As

No data available

Tableau Desktop, Tableau Server, Tableau Online

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

Tableau Enterprise offers powerful features for creating interactive visualizations, dashboards, and maps, including drag-and-drop functionality and easy integration with multiple data sources, promoting real-time collaboration and self-service analysis.

Tableau Enterprise stands out with its ability to create user-friendly, interactive visualizations, making it pivotal for business intelligence applications. Users benefit from its seamless connectivity and advanced analytical functions, facilitating data blending and storytelling. Despite a complex learning curve and high licensing costs, its features like geospatial analysis and efficient content distribution drive its indispensable value for data-driven insights. Enhancements in predictive analytics and support integration with machine learning tools further its capabilities across industries.

What are the most valuable features?

Interactive Visualizations: Enables users to create engaging reports.
Drag-and-Drop Functionality: Simplifies data analysis processes.
Data Integration: Offers seamless connectivity with multiple sources.
Real-Time Collaboration: Supports synchronous data sharing.
Advanced Analytics: Provides predictive analytics and geospatial analysis.

What benefits and ROI should users look for?

Informed Decision-Making: Facilitates data-driven insights.
Efficiency in Reporting: Streamlines dashboard and reporting tasks.
Cost-Effectiveness: Despite high licensing, value in robust analytics tools.
Customizable Options: Tailors analytics to specific needs.

Tableau Enterprise is widely used for business intelligence, supporting industries like healthcare, telecommunications, and finance. Organizations utilize it to analyze performance indicators, operational insights, and financial analytics, enhancing decision-making through interactive reports and real-time data integration.

Salesforce

Sample Customers

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

Accenture, Adobe, Amazon.com, Bank of America, Charles Schwab Corp, Citigroup, Coca-Cola Company, Cornell University, Dell, Deloitte, Duke University, eBay, Exxon Mobil, Fannie Mae, Ferrari, French Red Cross, Goldman Sachs, Google, Government of Canada, HP, Intel, Johns Hopkins Hospital, Macy's, Merck, The New York Times, PayPal, Pfizer, US Army, US Air Force, Skype, and Walmart.

Buyer's Guide

Looker vs. Tableau Enterprise

December 2025

Free Report: Looker vs. Tableau Enterprise

Find out what your peers are saying about Looker vs. Tableau Enterprise and other solutions. Updated: December 2025.

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