Software Alternatives, Accelerators & Startups

Looker VS Activeloop

Compare Looker VS Activeloop and see what are their differences

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Looker logo Looker

Looker makes it easy for analysts to create and curate custom data experiencesโ€”so everyone in the business can explore the data that matters to them, in the context that makes it truly meaningful.

Activeloop logo Activeloop

Data lake for machine and deep learning. The fastest dataset management tool for computer vision.
  • Looker Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-10-11

Looker is a business intelligence platform with an analytics-oriented application server that sits on top of relational data stores. The Looker platform includes an end-user interface for exploring data, a reusable development paradigm for creating data discovery experiences, and an extensible API set so the data can exist in other systems. Looker enables anyone to search and explore data, build dashboards and reports, and share everything easily and quickly.

  • Activeloop Landing page
    Landing page //
    2021-09-20

About

Activeloop provides an optimized format for unstructured data, so users can stream their machine learning datasets while training ML models in PyTorch and TensorFlow. Activeloop acts as a data lake for deep learning on unstructured data and offers in-browser dataset visualization, querying, and version control. On top of those features, Activeloop integrates with experimentation and labeling tools to allow rapid iteration on computer vision datasets.

Activeloop supports the following use cases:

Machine Learning teams can apply Activeloop's data infrastructure to ship their models fast in the following use cases:

  1. AgriTech
  2. Audio processing
  3. Autonomous Vehicles & Robotics
  4. Biomedical and Healthcare ML
  5. Multimedia: Image enhancement, video enhancement, face detection, sports analytics, or machine learning for AR/VR
  6. Safety & Security: surveillance machine learning with biometrics, facial recognition, or crowd counting

Looker

Website
looker.com
$ Details
-
Platforms
-
Release Date
-
Startup details
Country
United States

Activeloop

$ Details
$450.0 / Monthly (Growth Plan for up to 10 users)
Platforms
AWS GCP Python
Release Date
2019 July

Looker features and specs

  • Powerful Data Modeling
    Looker uses LookML, a proprietary modeling language, making it possible to transform raw data into meaningful metrics and dimensions, providing deep insights without needing SQL expertise.
  • Ease of Use
    Its intuitive user interface enables non-technical users to create visualizations and reports with relative ease, reducing the workload on data teams.
  • Customization
    Looker offers extensive customization options for data exploration and visualization, allowing dashboards and reports to be tailored to specific user needs.
  • Embedded Analytics
    Provides robust capabilities for embedding analytics into applications or portals, broadening the scope of data-driven decision-making throughout the organization.
  • Real-time Data
    Supports real-time data analytics by querying live data, which ensures up-to-date insights and helps in making timely decisions.
  • Integrations
    Looker integrates seamlessly with a wide range of databases and cloud data warehouses, including Google BigQuery, Amazon Redshift, and Snowflake.

Possible disadvantages of Looker

  • Learning Curve
    LookML, while powerful, can be complex for beginners who are not already familiar with data modeling or SQL, resulting in a steep learning curve.
  • Cost
    Looker can be expensive, especially for small businesses, as pricing is typically based on the number of users and the data volume processed.
  • Performance
    Query performance can sometimes be slow, especially with complex data models and large data sets, which may impact the user experience.
  • Customization Constraints
    While Looker offers great customization, certain advanced customizations may require significant expertise and time, posing a potential barrier.
  • Limited Offline Capabilities
    Looker is primarily designed for online use, so it lacks robust offline capabilities, which can be a limitation for users who need access to data in situations without internet connectivity.

Activeloop features and specs

No features have been listed yet.

Analysis of Looker

Overall verdict

  • Looker is generally considered a robust solution for organizations looking to enhance their data-driven decision-making capabilities. Its flexibility, extensibility, and ease of use make it a strong contender in the BI space, though it may require some learning and setup effort to fully utilize its features.

Why this product is good

  • Looker is a data analytics platform that provides powerful tools for data exploration, visualization, and business intelligence. It offers a user-friendly interface and is known for its ability to connect to a wide variety of data sources. Looker's LookML, a modeling language, allows users to define data relationships and calculations, making it easier to create custom reports and dashboards. Additionally, it integrates well with other tools and supports collaboration with data teams.

Recommended for

  • Companies seeking scalable and flexible business intelligence solutions.
  • Organizations that need to integrate multiple data sources.
  • Teams looking for a collaborative platform with custom reporting capabilities.
  • Users who prefer a code-based approach to data modeling and analysis.

Analysis of Activeloop

Overall verdict

  • Activeloop is a solid choice for teams working with large-scale AI/ML datasets, particularly those involving unstructured data like images, video, and audio, offering a specialized data infrastructure (Deep Lake) that streamlines dataset versioning, storage, and streaming for machine learning workflows.

Why this product is good

  • Deep Lake format enables efficient storage and streaming of large unstructured datasets directly to ML training pipelines without full downloads
  • Built-in version control for datasets, similar to Git, making it easier to track changes and collaborate on data
  • Native integrations with popular ML frameworks like PyTorch and TensorFlow, plus support for vector search and LLM-based applications
  • Cloud-agnostic storage options allowing flexibility across AWS, GCP, and other providers
  • Strong focus on performance optimization for data loading, reducing bottlenecks in training large models
  • Growing ecosystem with support for multimodal data types, useful for computer vision and generative AI projects

Recommended for

  • ML engineers and data scientists working with large-scale image, video, or audio datasets
  • Teams building computer vision or multimodal AI applications
  • Organizations needing dataset version control integrated into their ML pipeline
  • Developers building retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) or LLM applications requiring vector storage
  • Startups and enterprises looking to optimize data loading performance for deep learning training
  • Teams seeking an alternative to traditional data lakes for AI-specific workloads

Looker videos

Looker Review

More videos:

  • Tutorial - How To Use Looker as a Business User
  • Review - Looker Review - Off The Shelf Reviews

Activeloop videos

Activeloop Product Demo Video

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Looker and Activeloop)
Data Dashboard
100 100%
0% 0
Machine Learning
0 0%
100% 100
Business Intelligence
100 100%
0% 0
Data Science Tools
0 0%
100% 100

User comments

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Reviews

These are some of the external sources and on-site user reviews we've used to compare Looker and Activeloop

Looker Reviews

Top 10 BI Tools in 2026 (with Pricing, AI Features & Enterprise Fit)
Looker like business intelligence platforms include tools that offer governed data models, embedded analytics, real-time dashboards, and scalable cloud performance. These platforms are ideal for organizations that need consistent metrics, strong data governance, and customizable analytics similar to what Looker provides.
Source: supaboard.ai
Explore 7 Tableau Alternatives for Data Visualization and Analysis
Looker Studio, formerly Google Data Studio, is a user-friendly business intelligence tool that transforms raw data into interactive, customizable dashboards and reports. It integrates seamlessly with Google's ecosystem and supports various data sources, including Google Analytics and BigQuery. Looker Studio offers robust visualization capabilities and real-time collaborative...
Source: www.draxlr.com
Explore 6 Metabase Alternatives for Data Visualization and Analysis
To find the best Metabase alternative for your business, start by listing your specific requirements, such as customer support, data integrations, visualization options, user access controls, and budget. Compare these needs with the features of other BI tools like Draxlr, Tableau, Power BI, Looker, or Holistics. Once you've identified a few suitable options, take advantage...
Source: www.draxlr.com
5 best Looker alternatives
In this blog, weโ€™ll dive into the best 5 Looker alternatives currently dominating the market. Whether you're seeking a Looker alternative with enhanced features, better pricing, or a more tailored fit for your analytics needs, this guide will help you discover BI tool that could be a perfect match for your business.
Source: www.draxlr.com
10 Best Alternatives to Looker in 2024
Exploring alternatives to Looker isn't just about finding a different tool; it's about uncovering solutions that better address your specific business challenges and operational workflows. Here, we highlight five areas where Looker's limitations might lead you to consider other options.

Activeloop Reviews

We have no reviews of Activeloop yet.
Be the first one to post

Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, Looker should be more popular than Activeloop. It has been mentiond 14 times since March 2021. We are tracking product recommendations and mentions on various public social media platforms and blogs. They can help you identify which product is more popular and what people think of it.

Looker mentions (14)

  • edit home page to add folder section
    Then in the "foldername" you can have 5 folders, each one for each of the groups. This means that when group1 enters looker.com, his default page will be the "foldername", which contains group1folder (he cannot see the rest of the folders if you have set the permissions correctly for each folder). Source: over 3 years ago
  • Stars, tables, and activities: How do we model the real world?
    Even if you want to make Wide Tables, combining fact and dimensions is often the easiest way to create them, so why not make them available? Looker, for example, is well suited to dimensional models because it takes care of the joins that can make Kimball warehouses hard to navigate for business users. - Source: dev.to / over 3 years ago
  • dbt for Data Quality Testing & Alerting at FINN
    We take daily snapshots of test results, aggregate them, and send Looker dashboards to the appropriate teams. - Source: dev.to / over 4 years ago
  • I'm a dev ID 10 T please help me
    Dashboard: I like to use Datastudio because it's easy (just like using google sheets), but you can also try out Looker. Source: over 4 years ago
  • The Data Stack Journey: Lessons from Architecting Stacks at Heroku and Mattermost
    For Growth and larger, I would recommend Looker. The only reason I wouldn't recommend it for the smaller company stages is that the cost is much higher than alternatives such as Metabase. With Looker, you define your data model in LookML, which Looker then uses to provide a drag-and-drop interface for end-users that enables them to build their own visualizations without needing to write SQL. This lets your... - Source: dev.to / over 4 years ago
View more

Activeloop mentions (4)

  • [P] I built a Chatbot to talk with any Github Repo. ๐Ÿช„
    This repository contains two Python scripts that demonstrate how to create a chatbot using Streamlit, OpenAI GPT-3.5-turbo, and Activeloop's Deep Lake. The chatbot searches a dataset stored in Deep Lake to find relevant information and generates responses based on the user's input. Source: about 3 years ago
  • [D] NLP has HuggingFace, what does Computer Vision have?
    u/Remote_Cancel_7977 we just launched 100+ computer vision datasets via Activeloop Hub yesterday on r/ML (#1 post for the day!). Note: we do not intend to compete with HuggingFace (we're building the database for AI). Accessing computer vision datasets via Hub is much faster than via HuggingFace though, according to some third-party benchmarks. :). Source: about 4 years ago
  • [P] Database for AI: Visualize, version-control & explore image, video and audio datasets
    Hub, our open-source package, lets you stream datasets while training to PyTorch/TensorFlow. Check out how we achieved 95% GPU utilization while training on ImageNet at 50% less cost. We're building the Database for AI, with everything it should contain. If there's an adjacent feature that would make it more useful for your workflow, do let us know! Source: over 4 years ago
  • [P] Database for AI: Visualize, version-control & explore image, video and audio datasets
    I'm Davit from Activeloop (activeloop.ai). Source: over 4 years ago

What are some alternatives?

When comparing Looker and Activeloop, you can also consider the following products

Tableau - Tableau can help anyone see and understand their data. Connect to almost any database, drag and drop to create visualizations, and share with a click.

Iterative.ai - Iterative removes friction from managing datasets and ML models and introduces seamless data scientists collaboration.

Microsoft Power BI - BI visualization and reporting for desktop, web or mobile

Pachyderm - Pachyderm is an open source analytics engine that uses Docker containers for distributed computations.

Sisense - The BI & Dashboard Software to handle multiple, large data sets.

Scale - Get human tasks done with just one line of code.