When you search for Looker pricing, most of what you’ll find comes from Looker’s competitors. And while that’s understandable, it also means the conversation is often tilted toward sticker shock, without enough context to explain what you’re really paying for.
Just take a look at some top-ranking results:
As a data consultancy that has worked with Looker, Power BI, Metabase, QuickSight, Holistics, and newer tools like Omni and Zenlytics, we wanted to bring a more balanced (and experienced) perspective.
We’ll break down what goes into Looker pricing, how it compares to alternatives, and, most importantly, what hidden costs you might be saving when you choose Looker.
Looker is a modern business intelligence platform, founded by Lloyd Tabb and Ben Porterfield in 2012, with this key concept analytics should be easily modeled.
Lloyd Tabb pioneered early versions of Looker at prior companies, coming up with ways to re-use SQL patterns to make it easier for key data individuals to deliver metrics to the business quickly and accurately.
As cloud based, analytical databases became mainstream and Looker was well positioned to provide a language that generated SQL queries that could run directly against these warehouses. Analysts could now quickly encode logic in a semantic layer that business users could self serve from. The in database architecture meant users were not bound by pre-aggregations and could access row level detail.
Jeff Garcia - CEO at Shearwater.
Most BI tools focus solely on data visualization: they help you create charts and dashboards, but they don’t help you manage the underlying logic behind your metrics. That logic often lives in ad hoc SQL queries or spreadsheets, scattered across teams.