Sigma vs. Looker
Considering Looker? Look Again.
Sigma delivers true self-service ad hoc analytics — no LookML or SQL Required.
Sigma vs. Looker
Feeling the LookML blues?
- Low adoption
- Model bloat
- dbt redundancies
Sigma delivers true self-service analytics – no LookML required.
Sigma
Empowers self-service analytics in a governed familiar UI: the spreadsheet.
Frees data and BI teams from managing an additional model on top of dbt.
Enables business users to freely drill down to row level data at massive scale.
CSAT: 4.8. Real-time dedicated in-app support for your entire organization in minutes. 30-min dedicated office hours over Zoom to all accounts
Looker
Requires knowledge of proprietary, developer focused LookML language.
Models are high maintenance. Looker creates a redundant metadata layer on top of dbt.
Business users resort to exporting to excel.
No dedicated technical support unless purchased separately
Real time support in minutes, not days
“The support team is nailing it, it’s really good support. Please keep it and even if you make it “VIP Treatment”, then we want to be VIP. We love your live support.”
Nan Xiao
CTO, Greenland Capital Management
“There hasn’t been a single data question I haven’t been able to answer in Sigma once I engage the support team for help.”
Matthew Jennings
Director, Orennia
“What really helped make my life easier in making the case for Sigma was the thought, effort, and responsiveness that your team put in whereas the competition simply lacked that level of depth!”
Orr Segev
Director of Analytics, OpenWeb
Why Companies Choose Sigma Over Looker
A language and interface teams already know and love
Whether data experts know spreadsheets or SQL, Looker requires learning their proprietary language, LookML. In contrast, Sigma gives analysts the option to leverage their existing expertise, saving time, resources and ensuring adoption. Sigma gives everyone — including non-technical users — the ability to query the data warehouse directly using an intuitive spreadsheet UI with familiar formulas and functions.
Flexible data curation with zero pre-modeling required
With Looker, data must be extensively modeled using LookML before business users can access it. Even when similar transformation has already been performed with tools like dbt. Sigma’s spreadsheet experience allows even non-technical users to freely explore, calculate, filter, and sort through billions of rows of data directly in the cloud data warehouse with no modeling required. Users can also endorse and curate datasets for collaborative analytics on trusted data.
Ad hoc cloud data exploration puts answers at the user’s fingertips
Because Looker locks data access behind proprietary code and predefined paths, business teams are forced to wait in request queues or turn to risky, outdated data extracts to get the answers they need. Sigma’s spreadsheet UI empowers any user to query billions of rows of live data down to the lowest level of detail to find answers to critical questions in real time — no coding, pre-modeling, or extracts required.
Explore our Customer Stories
Taylor Perkins
Co-founder & CTO, Slope Software
“If you had told me a year ago that we were going to switch embedded analytics' providers, I would’ve told you, you were crazy. Looker was integrated throughout our application. However, after running into enough roadblocks, limitations, and support issues, we started searching for alternatives and finally implemented Sigma.”
Raashi Hasija
Head of CRM
“We have our customer table and transaction-level data from our e-commerce store as well as our brick-and-mortar retail stores,”. “Sigma has been really helpful in collating all of our data together so we can create rich customer 360s. We're no longer isolated in our view of the customer from just the online shopper but have been able to add color from the brick-and-mortar shopper as well.”
Ian Letourneau
BI Lead & DevOps Analyst
“Business users who had never seen Sigma before were able to jump right in and start creating reports, whereby with Looker I had to train them for weeks just to be able to do basic edits to LookML.”
Peter Jaffe
Head of Data
“We have reduced two full time employees doing virtually nothing but answering ad-hoc data requests to half of one full time employee’s time spent on ad-hoc requests. I had a goal of reducing ad-hoc data requests by 70%, and we have easily passed that.”
Jack Rhodes
Project Manager
“Because of how easy it is to join and report out on data across the platforms sales, marketing, operations, and project management use, we finally have an end-to-end view of the business to help us make better, data-driven decisions.”
Alex Harvey
Marketing Lead
“Because we had immediate access to all of our data, could run any analysis without the assistance of the BI team, and knew the data was accurate, we were able to pivot and relaunch our entire marketing strategy in just 30 days. Sigma made the transition from growth marketing to recovery marketing exponentially faster, easier, and more successful”
Additional Resources
Brands Driving their Business Forward with Sigma
We are Sigma.
Sigma is a cloud-native analytics platform that uses a familiar spreadsheet interface to give business users instant access to explore and get insights from their cloud data warehouse. It requires no code or special training to explore billions or rows, augment with new data, or perform “what if” analysis on all data in real-time.