Why Holistics Over Looker?

Get the analytics-as-code power of Looker without the enterprise friction. Holistics delivers transparent pricing, exceptional support, and faster product releases.

Better value for money

Transparent, usage-based pricing, start small and scale without enterprise lock-in

Exceptional customer support

Hands-on onboarding, dedicated Slack access, and <60min response times

Fast product releases

Weekly updates and monthly feature launches keep your team equipped with modern capabilities immediately

Powerful analytics-as-code

Git integration, peer reviews, and version control for collaborative BI development

Trusted metrics, governed semantic layer

Centralized metrics ensure consistency and trust across all reports

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Don't Just Take Our Words For It

What ex-Looker Users Said About Holistics.

Read Ex-Looker Case Study

Buying Analytics Tool Shouldn't Be A Huge Sweat

Advancing analytics is easier when you don't get bogged down by heavy upfront costs. Here's how Holistics has better value for money than Looker:

Holistics Looker
Starting Price Transparent. Can start small & scale up as usage grows. Opaque (need to speak to sales); Require high upfront commitments.
Evaluation Self-service trial; Speak to sales for further questions. Flexible trial extension. Sales-led; Compulsory to speak to Sales.
Payment Terms Monthly & annual payments are both available. Annual payment only.
Pricing Metrics Per Usage Per User
Onboarding Experience Gentler learning curve. Come with highly praised documentation. Steep learning curve, requires engagement with the training team, hence higher prices to make up for higher onboarding costs.
Customer Support Dedicated support agents and community forum. Complementary technical training is available. Only self-serve support via community forum.
Product Roadmap & Development Active development and weekly feature shipping. Slow down since Google acquisition.
See Our Pricing Table

Why Holistics Is A Better Looker Alternative: A Breakdown

Both Holistics and Looker utilize a centralized, cloud-based modeling approach, but Holistics offers greater flexibility through its free-form canvas dashboards and a more accessible GUI layer that simplifies complex calculations and cross-model metric reuse compared to Looker's more rigid, code-heavy requirements.

Holistics Looker
Build & edit dashboards
  • Unified UI + Code editing for dashboards (true as-code experience).
  • Canvas Dashboards support tabbed, free-form layout; place tiles anywhere with no grid constraints.
  • Have GUI options for various dashboard customizations.
  • Support default dashboard template for users to easily get started.
  • Two types of dashboards (User-defined vs LookML) leading to fragmentation.
  • Rigid grid-based, single-page dashboards with limited layout flexibility.
  • Customization requires deeper LookML knowledge.
  • No default dashboard template.
Explore pre-built data
  • Zero-setup drilling with smart suggestions: users can start drilling into data immediately without prior analyst configuration.
  • Customized drill fields at dataset or visualization levels: analysts can define custom drill lists at different levels to create guided drill experiences.
  • Requires predefined drill_field setup by analysts.
  • Drill fields can only be set at the dimension/measure level.
Analytics functions
  • Built-in, one-click calculations for running totals, moving averages, YoY/PoP comparisons, etc.
  • Flexible calculation builder: define and edit calculations via GUI or directly in code.
  • Readable high-level query language (AQL) for easier review, debugging, and AI-assisted editing.
  • No native, one-click GUI for complex calculations: analysts often need to write LookML or advanced table calcs.
  • Query logic is tightly coupled with LookML structure, making debugging harder.
Cross-model metrics
  • Native cross-model metrics reusable across datasets and dashboards → no duplication.
  • No true cross-model metric concept → teams recreate metrics in each explore/dataset.
Ease of learning (GUI layer)
  • Full modeling DSL plus a GUI to onboard analysts faster.
  • Users don’t need to learn AML from scratch; GUI keeps code and visual modeling in sync.
  • LookML has no GUI helper.
  • Analysts must learn the DSL directly, which slows onboarding and increases complexity.
Reusability levels
  • Supports multi-level reusability:
  • 1-click widget reuse with a block library
  • Reusable Blocks across dashboards
  • Code-level reuse with parameterizable AML components
  • LookML encourages code reuse, but heavy explore boundaries and duplicated datasets make reuse difficult in practice.
Support experience
  • High-touch support with shared Slack channels, onboarding help, and fast feedback loops with real engineers.
  • Customers often report Looker has become a “redheaded stepchild” inside Google, making timely, human support difficult, even for large accounts.
Speed of releases
  • Fast, transparent release cadence with weekly–biweekly improvements, rapid iteration based on customer feedback, and clear public change logs. Customers often see requested features shipped within weeks.
  • Release cycles have slowed post-acquisition; updates are less frequent and often bundled into larger Google Cloud timelines.
Read The Full Comparison

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Frequently Asked Questions

Good question. We're designed to give you the freedom to choose the right tool, without worrying about being locked in to any particular software. If you ever decide that Holistics is not the right tool for you and want to switch to another one, you can do that easily with our Analytics as code functionality. However, since Looker and Holistics are similar in architecture, recreating your Looker dashboards in Holistics are relatively straightforward.
As users of a lot of softwares ourselves, we hate vendor lock-in. If you ever decide that Holistics is not the right tool for you and want to migrate, you can do that easily with our upcoming Business Intelligence as code. Your entire BI project will be represented as text and checked in to your Git repository.
Yes. Read more about our GDPR Statement.

We also have a standard Data Privacy Agreement provided upon request, please email [email protected] for more information.
We engage a US vendor, Vanta, to provide our customers or companies evaluating our software with a live up-to-date report on our SOC2 compliance. Their assessment can be found in the link below: https://go.holistics.io/soc2live

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Holistics is intuitive, both technical and non-technical people can pick it up pretty fast.

For Data Consumers: zero learning curve. They can create their own charts and dashboards without writing SQL, using a drag-and-drop interface.

For Data/technical teams: just SQL knowledge is needed in terms of skills.
We support most popular SQL databases and data warehouses: Google BigQuery, Amazon Redshift, Snowflake, Presto, ClickHouse, AWS Athena, PostgreSQL, MySQL, SQL Server. See full list.
Although we're based in Singapore (Asia), the majority of our customers are in US and Europe. Despite the time zone difference, Customer Support has been among our most praised qualities from our customers.