Looker vs. Looker Studio

[keith_dowd]

Hi Looker family! I’ve been reading up on Looker Studio and am trying to understand how this product fits with the Looker product. Are these platforms competitors or are they meant to be used in tandem with each other? Does anyone have any use cases they would be willing to share where they’ve either integrated the use of Looker and Looker Studio or chosen one over the other to solve a problem? Thanks in advance for your insights.

[Dawid · Accepted solution]

They’re not competitors. Looker Studio is a simpler “window” to other Google products and other tools via connectors (Google Analytics etc.) and it can also use Looker Models instead of connecting directly to the data warehouse. Looker is a fully-fledged platform where you can manage content (Looks, Dashboards, Merge Queries, Boards).

From what I understood over the years, Data Studio was supposed to compete with Power BI, Tableau, and Looker but the market was already happy with all the choices. Then Google decided to buy Looker instead of investing heavily in building something new but Data Studio was already used so let’s say it’s a simpler version of Looker.

[keith_dowd]

@Dawid Thanks!

[Wiktor_Jurek]

It bugged me that there was no good explanation for this online, so I wrote a small article that outlines the key differences 👇

https://www.cobry.co.uk/looker-vs-looker-studio

Basically, think of Looker as the mantle of the BI aspect of your organisation. Everything builds on top of Looker. Looker Studio is a way to access and build reports on that trusted, underlying data model that Looker builds. 

[ks2000]

Exactly what I was looking for. Thanks!

[cesarAlasDev]

Excellent content!

[a_shah]

Hi @keith_dowd 

To start, Looker is a relatively newer and a licensed product from Google whereas Looker Studio (aka Data Studio) is a free and robust data visualization tool from Google. Google bought Looker to expand the horizon and enable a lot of new age data experiences. In my view, Looker will become a category defining BI platform in coming future. In the market currently there is a huge focus on data visualization and Looker Studio, Tableau and power BI are very popular for it. But there are very limited to no options when it comes to enabling use cases like

• Governed Business Definition across Org,
• develop custom data application for specific business needs,
• productize and monitize the huge amount of data sitting in organization's data lakes,
• embedding and integrating insights into organization's web portals and other workforce applications like jira, slack, marketo etc.
• An open marketplace for partners and google to develop custom application leveraging Looker's wrapper, custom visualization, actions and blocks". Looker enables all these use cases using its different features and capabilities. 

Looker enables all the above use cases and helps organizations to build a scalable and versatile platform that is governed and yet agile and while delivering the analytical insights it can include stakeholders from CxO to external partners to ground-zero workforce. Looker APIs is the crown jewel of Looker ecosystem that enables unique business workflows driven by data.

Looker Studio is a great Data Visualization tool, and on top its free, so anyone in the organization can use it and analyze their data. Its a great plus where insights gets democratized across organization at no cost.  

The way Looker and Looker studio comes together is that the business definitions are abstracted in the explores using Looker then Looker studio uses a connector to connect to these explores and pull data from data source for reporting and visualization.

~Ashish 

[viniciussoares]

Looker Studio does a much better job at visualising. It is a wonderful visualisation tool. Very powerful in this area, if you ask me. Super flexible in the UI and has great management capabilities since the launch of the Pro version in Dec.22. Whilst Looker has a more limited capability on this sense. If the organisation has a modelling layer well structured (eg: dbt connecting to BigQuery or Snowflake, Databricks, Dataform etc), I don't think there is a use case for buying Looker. 

For orgs that don't have a data modelling platform Looker could solve, with the connectors and the platformisation intent and LookML. However, LookML in my opinion has very little space in data modelling when compared to SQL and Python, for example. It's verbose, not very practical (with the unnecessarily complex folder structure) and on top of it, it is only used within Looker, when the other well established data modelling libraries for Python (PySpark also) and SQL are way ahead in performance, versatility and robustness, not to mention the community maturity.

[Amaboh]

Looker is an enterprise grade data exploration, report building, and dashboarding tool that can handle huge data sets relatively well and has a semantic layer to manage metric definitions via LookML. You can basically hook it up to as much of your dw as you want and go from there. Also version control. And ability to drill, depending on the grain of the data. Also an API for embedding. Looker studio FKA Data studio is a little more limited in data processing and scope but does offer a lower barrier to entry and more familiar interface for less technical users. Have a sheet with data you want to quickly build an aggregated dashboard for, works fine. You can serve similar use cases with either but Looker will scale where studio will not.