Software Alternatives, Accelerators & Startups

Packer VS Looker

Compare Packer VS Looker and see what are their differences

Packer logo Packer

Packer is an open-source software for creating identical machine images from a single source configuration.

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.
  • Packer Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-09-15
  • 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.

Packer videos

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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 Packer and Looker)
DevOps Tools
100 100%
0% 0
Data Dashboard
0 0%
100% 100
Continuous Integration And Delivery
Business Intelligence
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 Packer and Looker

Packer Reviews

Introduction to Top Open Source Virtualization Tools
Packer is notably light, high performing, and operates on every major operating system. It assembles and configures all the necessary components for a virtual machine then creates images that run on multiple platforms. Packer doesn’t replace configuration management tools like Puppet or Chef; as a matter of fact, when creating images, Packer can utilize tools like Puppet or...

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, Looker should be more popular than Packer. 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.

Packer mentions (9)

  • Failed to connect to the host via SSH on Ubuntu 22.04
    If you have just upgraded to Ubuntu 22.04, and you suddenly experience either errors when trying to ssh into hosts, or when running ansible or again when running the ansible provisioner building a packer image, this is probably going to be useful for you. - Source: dev.to / over 1 year ago
  • Create a minimalist OS using Docker Containers and Hashicorp Packer
    I am already using Hashicorp Packer at work and for personal projects and I wanted to test This idea out by wrapping it a single Packer Template file. This reduces the level of maintaining a lot of small scripts, Dockerfiles and configurations and the user can simply trigger a couple of Commands to get a minimalist OS at the end of the process. - Source: dev.to / over 1 year ago
  • After self-hosting my email for twenty-three years I have thrown in the towel. The oligopoly has won.
    And while it is a slight increase in complexity, it can be an overall net gain in functionality, configurability and reliability. Much like Packer is far more reliable and practical than manually making VM images sitting in front of a terminal, even though making the initial configuration takes some time. Source: over 1 year ago
  • Customized Ubuntu Images using Packer + QEMU + Cloud-Init & UEFI bootloading
    Hashicorp Packer provides a nice wrapper / abstraction over the QEMU in order to boot the image and use it to set it up on first-boot. Instead of writing really long commands in order to boot up the image using QEMU, Packer provided a nice Configuration Template in a more Readable fashion. - Source: dev.to / over 1 year ago
  • The journey of sharing a wired USB printer over the network
    Packer seemed like the perfect tool for the job. I have never used it before and wanted to get familiar with the tool. It doesn't come with ARM support out of the box, but there are two community projects to fill that niche. - Source: dev.to / about 2 years 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 Packer and Looker, you can also consider the following products

Terraform - Tool for building, changing, and versioning infrastructure safely and efficiently.

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.

Rancher - Open Source Platform for Running a Private Container Service

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

Puppet Enterprise - Get started with Puppet Enterprise, or upgrade or expand.

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