Software Alternatives & Reviews

Observable VS Looker

Compare Observable VS Looker and see what are their differences

Observable logo Observable

Interactive code examples/posts

Looker logo Looker

Looker makes it easy for analysts to create and curate custom data experiences—so everyone in the business can explore the data that matters to them, in the context that makes it truly meaningful.
  • Observable Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-10-09
  • 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.

Observable videos

Observable Overview

More videos:

  • Review - observablehq.com review observable hq data analysis
  • Review - Hands-on Data Visualization with Observable Plot

Looker videos

Looker Review

More videos:

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

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Observable and Looker)
Data Visualization
42 42%
58% 58
Data Dashboard
15 15%
85% 85
Business Intelligence
0 0%
100% 100
Data Science And Machine Learning

User comments

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Reviews

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

Observable Reviews

Top 10 Grafana Alternatives in 2024
Observable is a Grafana alternative that enables users to visualize data via charts and dashboards using code.
Source: middleware.io
Embedded analytics in B2B SaaS: A comparison
A few options were disregarded from the start due to a hefty price tag, these were Looker, Tableau, Power BI, GoodData. A few options like Trevor.io, Preset, Observable were disregarded as they did not seem to fit our criteria (based on the evaluation matrix).
Source: medium.com

Looker Reviews

Embedded analytics in B2B SaaS: A comparison
Similar to Holistics also Metabase is a BI tool at its core. It however feels nothing like Looker and has a unique feel to it. It felt quite intuitive how its set-up but there’s still quite a steep learning curve, even for a well-seasoned data professional. Also Metabase offers an iFrame implementation for embedding. An added advantage of Metabase is that they are...
Source: medium.com
Best 8 Redash Alternatives in 2023 [In Depth Guide]
Like Looker, Ploty doesn’t list its pricing on the official website. You’ll have to complete their web form and speak with a team member to receive a custom price quote. When completing the form, you’ll have to mention whether you’re a professional or a student.
Source: www.datapad.io
8 Alternatives to Apache Superset That’ll Empower Start-ups and Small Businesses with BI
Tableau, Trevor.io and Metabase can work as Looker alternatives. We also wrote an article on customer-Hosted Looker alternatives.
Source: trevor.io
Top 10 Data Analysis Tools in 2022
Looker Looker provides embedded analytics for users; speeding up the creation of data-driven applications. Looker Enterprise can cost up to $5,000 per month. Looker is a cloud-based data analysis platform that can provide medium to large-sized companies with all they need for data analysis. However, Looker is limited to working with SQL databases.
Best Google Data Studio Alternatives (Self-Service BI)
Looker is a modern analytics and BI platform that enables users to integrate, explore, and visualize data. Looker is primarily deployed in the cloud. Core to its approach is its data modeling language, LookML, in which data analysts write code to define business metrics and manipulate data. The platform supports a wide range of data sources and visualizations and can be...

Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, Observable seems to be a lot more popular than Looker. While we know about 284 links to Observable, we've tracked only 14 mentions of Looker. 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.

Observable mentions (284)

  • A feature-rich front-end drag-and-drop component library
    Maybe I'm easy to impress, but I always stop and play around with the nested tree example when I come across Sortable. It works so flawlessly, and feels very tuned to mobile dnd. It even works to arrange (and reflow) inline spans in a paragraph! I have yet to come across this functionality in a text editor.. [0]: https://observablehq.com/@dleeftink/sortable-playground. - Source: Hacker News / 1 day ago
  • Parquet-WASM: Rust-based WebAssembly bindings to read and write Parquet data
    Arrow JS is just ArrayBuffers underneath. You do want to amortize some operations to avoid unnecessary conversions. I.e. Arrow JS stores strings as UTF-8, but native JS strings are UTF-16 I believe. Arrow is especially powerful across the WASM <--> JS boundary! In fact, I wrote a library to interpret Arrow from Wasm memory into JS without any copies [0]. (Motivating blog post [1]) [0]:... - Source: Hacker News / 4 days ago
  • A flat map with the least error possible: The Gott-Goldberg-Vanderbei projection
    Here’s the D3 implementation (which is just an interrupted azimuthal equidistant projection): https://observablehq.com/@d3/azimuthal-equidistant-hemispheres. - Source: Hacker News / 4 days ago
  • Hardest Problem in Computer Science: Centering Things
    I made a quick tool to apply the trick he suggests at the end of the article: https://observablehq.com/@gampleman/font-centering-tool. - Source: Hacker News / 9 days ago
  • Zooming User Interface (ZUI)
    There is maybe some room for design too (Figma), but there are many times I wish it DIDN'T do that and encouraged better frame/file organization instead. ------- It can also be useful for some visualizations, like taxonomy: https://itol.embl.de/itol.cgi or https://www.onezoom.org/life.html "Drill down for details" like in disk space analysis: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKClylmlv3w&t=1s (or similar one in D3:... - Source: Hacker News / 11 days ago
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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: about 1 year 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 1 year 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 / about 2 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 2 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 2 years ago
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What are some alternatives?

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

RunKit - RunKit notebooks are interactive javascript playgrounds connected to a complete node environment right in your browser. Every npm module pre-installed.

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.

D3.js - D3.js is a JavaScript library for manipulating documents based on data. D3 helps you bring data to life using HTML, SVG, and CSS.

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

Jupyter - Project Jupyter exists to develop open-source software, open-standards, and services for interactive computing across dozens of programming languages. Ready to get started? Try it in your browser Install the Notebook.

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