Looker
Looker is Google Cloud's business intelligence platform, built around LookML — a version-controlled modelling language in which metrics and joins are defined once and every dashboard, explore, and API call is generated from that definition rather than from ad-hoc SQL.
LicenseCommercial
DeploymentManaged
PricingSubscription
Operational complexityLow
WorkloadInteractive
Use it when
- Metric drift has burned you: LookML defines joins, dimensions, and measures once, in code, and every chart compiles from that one model.
- Definitions belong in git: the model is versioned, reviewed, and deployed like software.
- Other tools should query the same semantic layer: Sheets, Excel, Power BI, Tableau, and ThoughtSpot can read it.
- Governed self-serve is the goal: business users explore freely within what developers have modelled.
Think twice when
- The data is not in a database already: around 50 SQL dialects and nothing else, no files, spreadsheets, or SaaS APIs.
- You need self-hosting: the current Google Cloud offering is hosted only, and customer-hosted deployments mean the older Looker (original).
- Prices must be knowable up front: every edition reads "call sales", licensed per platform edition and per user by type.
How it runs
Managed on Google Cloud. Developers write LookML in a git-backed project; every query compiles to SQL and pushes down to the connected database, with no extracts. Embedding runs through signed SSO or the Embed SDK, and API quota is the real difference between the Standard, Enterprise, and Embed editions.
Details
CompareHow Looker answers the questions Business Intelligence turns on.
Business Intelligence
| How it works | |
| Authoring model | Business users build in Explore; developers write LookML |
| Semantic layer | LookML: dimensions, measures and joins declared once, in code |
| Query execution | Pushdown only: LookML compiles to SQL the database runs |
| Chart library | A built-in chart set extended by custom visualizations added at the admin panel and installed from the marketplace |
| Definitions in | Git: a bare repository on the Looker server, or an external provider |
| Alerts and delivery | Conditional alerts on dashboard tiles (single value, time series or categorical) to email, Slack or a webhook, distinct from scheduled deliveries that send on a timetable regardless |
| Connections | |
| Connectors | Around 50 SQL dialects and nothing else, no files, spreadsheets or SaaS APIs, so the data has to be in a database already; the traffic the other way is richer, with Sheets, Excel, Power BI, Tableau and ThoughtSpot able to query the semantic layer |
| Embedding | Private embed for users already signed in, signed SSO embed for everyone else, plus an Embed SDK and a cookieless variant; production embedding is its own platform edition |
| Access | |
| Access control | Roles pair a permission set with a model set, folders carry content access, and row-level security is access filters parameterised by user attributes, with access grants gating whole Explores, joins, views or fields |
| Cost | |
| Billing unit | A platform licence by edition (Standard, Enterprise or Embed) plus named user licences priced by type, quoted through Google Cloud rather than published |
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