5 Alternatives To Building Dashboards With Looker
.Companies generate far too much data to visually grasp exactly what is happening via spreadsheets. Data visualization is the way that access to this data has been made available to everyone within a company. No longer is the IT department the gatekeeper to useful information about your customers, users, visitors, and funnels.
One popular solution is Looker.
Looker is a business intelligence tool that is browser-based, so you do not need to download any software at all. The online environment makes it easy to allow multiple users within your workspace to access your dashboards.
Looker allows you to create a range of dynamic dashboards, which you can shape to your specific business goals. The interactivity makes it easy to keep them relevant and goal-orientated.
Looker requires a relatively large amount of upfront work to create the semantic framework for all of your business logic and metrics. This can provide a lot of benefits when set-up correctly but not every company has a staff with the correct expertise or time to develop said semantic framework. In addition, the recent actions from Google laying off Looker’s customer support staff is concerning.
All this is to say that Looker is great, but not for everyone. There are plenty of other great data visualization tools out there such as Tableau, Sisense, Sigma and more. Below we will discuss how these tools can act as great alternatives to Looker.
Tableau – What Is It and Why Use It
Tableau is an excellent piece of software that has a range of preparation and data connection tools available to make preparing data simple and quick. This takes the manual labor out of the process. It also means that your data analysis can be faster and more flexible, able to quickly find answers to new questions as they come up, when interrogating the analytics.
In particular, Tableau’s ability to bring together data from multiple sources makes it effective at saving time and effort. There are no row limits, and it is designed for scale, so you will not be left hanging around with unmanageable processing times for even the largest and most complex queries.
Tableau’s strength is its beautiful visualizations, available in a range of styles. The drag and drop interface makes it easy to trial new queries and methods of presentation so that you can try things out as you go — and perhaps drill down into your analytic data in a new and unexpected way.
It is also simple to update your tables and presentations as new data is made available so you are never working with obsolete data or assumptions.
Sigma Computing – What Is It and Why Use It
Sigma workbooks provide a collaborative canvas that is simple for a team to use. The security setup is excellent, so access can be set according to roles, and there is SSO/IdP integration as well as container checking.
The visualizations that Sigma generates are always made using live data. Also, they are interactive so that you can click through to reach more granular layers of data as you interrogate the data.
The dashboards that you create are simple to embed into other documents, allowing you to report to external stakeholders or easily demonstrate return on investment.
Sigma Computing offers an easy transition to a familiar spreadsheet interface if required. It is set up for large data sources and can even pull multiple sources together in seamless data blending without long wait times. The spreadsheet interface has a lot of flexible options that mean it can be applied to scenario modeling, cohort or segment analysis, and even more advanced levels of analysis — including cross-level calculations.
Sisense – What Is It and Why Use It
Sisense is business intelligence software that is artificial intelligence driven. It analyzes data and shares insights quickly and effectively using a simple drag and drop interface. You can create an unlimited number of dashboards and easily share them via email or export them using the usual software tools.
You can also set alerts when your main key performance indicators reach, exceed, or fall below the allocated levels. This feature is referred to as Sisense Pulse. There is also a mobile function — Sisense Go — that allows you to access your dashboards on the go using a dedicated app.
Sisense makes use of a high-performance database called Elasticube. It allows huge amounts of data to be queried repeatedly, even bringing together data from a range of sources but applying a query to them as if they were a single unit. As Sisense can integrate with over 100 data sources, you are unlikely to experience any compatibility issues.
Amazon QuickSite – What Is It and Why Use It
QuickSite is offered as a part of Amazon’s Web Services. It can help upgrade your business’s reporting capabilities into a sophisticated and interactive data analysis tool. You can either link to or import data from a wide range of sources.
QuickSite runs through a SPICE engine. This is a super-fast, parallel, in-memory calculation engine with unique column storage allowing large amounts of data to be manipulated simultaneously and quickly.
You can access QuickSite on a range of devices including a native mobile app. The tool is simple to use for even non-tech staff, because the visualizations are smart and interactive. This powerful cloud-based tool can help to optimize productivity because of features like the interactive GUI, which allows data visualizations to be shared efficiently across teams and stakeholders.
Power BI – What Is It And Why Use It?
Power BI is very popular amongst analysts because it gives them a very powerful tool to access large amounts of data. It also offers an easy drag and drop UI that allows analysts of all skill levels to approach dashboard development.
For more experienced analysts Power BI’s Power Pivot data modelling engine is a highly performant columnar database, using modern tabular database technologies to compress databases and ensure they load fully into memory for the best possible performance.
It also allows end-users to implement Python, R and DAX(data analysis expressions). Allowing analysts that are more technically proficiently to go beyond just the drag and drop nature of Power BI. Unlike Looker which requires an understanding of LookML which isn’t as intuitive as DAX(and serves a different purpose), Power BI provides and easy to understand alternative to Looker.
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