[KingOfCoders]

Looker is obscenely expensive compared to Tableau. Also the UI is bad.

The caching of Tableau is a huge money safer and huge performance boost if you e.g. use it with BigQuery (cut our BG costs by 80%).

As with every data tool, you need strong data governance, or everyone will define their own metric for revenue and then you have endless discussions about "why the data is wrong" (it isn't).

The biggest benefit to me is every marketing person knows Tableau and with a self explaining table structure (e.g. DBT on top of BigQuery) is self serving.

The only good thing with Looker is their data journeys, which Tableau doesn't have.

The worst (for EU/GDPR at least) feature of Looker is how people can send emails from a query (circumventing corporate email infrastructure, blacklists, data protection etc.). Can you say "Intern sends spam mail to millions of customers because they thought this was a good idea".

[aaronharnly]

We use both Looker and Tableau. It’s astonishing to me how Looker has stagnated since being acquired by Google. It’s really moribund.

[dswalter]

Before they were acquired by Google, looker had a bunch of really engaged community support people, and the docs were great for what the product did. There were learning paths for different types of users and tutorials linked to references in a way that made sense. I learned a lot about effective documentation (and looker!) from going through what they had.

Google laid off their US-based community support team (https://www.reddit.com/r/Looker/comments/t5jpwk/google_cloud...) and in the time since, those docs links have rotted/disconnected.

Even if 100 US-based community support folks were making $300K in total comp, why would you not spend $30MM to keep your $2.6B acquisition humming along? A bit mystifying.

[anon84873628]

One wonders why Google bothers acquiring companies if it's impossible to integrate them into the monolith.

[ianburrell]

I think they should keep acquisitions under Alphabet and separate from Google. What is the point of having umbrella corporation if not going to use it?

[KingOfCoders]

Yes, I thought the same.

[oxfordmale]

I am not recommending Looker either, but data extract stored on the server? That is a last-century solution. We often hit data limits in Tableau online as colleagues get overzealous.

Beyond that, it is also a major GDPR headache in Europe. If someone uses their personal account, with elevated access, you suddenly have a data extract on the Tableau Online server that contains personal data, with no way to enforce retention periods.