Alternative To Looker: Holistics, An As-Code Self-Service BI

Trial Experience and Pricing

While both tools are directionally similar, the go-to-market approaches are different, thus what the end customers experience throghout the evaluation process is different.

Looker’s target market are mainly enterprise customers, thus their entry price may not be affordable for some companies. They also do not provide a self-service trial experience, you need to contact a salesperson to even start to try out Looker.

On the other hand, Holistics provides an affordable alternative to Looker for SMBs and mid-markets. It provides a fully self-service trial process. Pricing is also transparent and starts at $100, making it easier to try out.

Data Modeling Layer

Looker and Holistics are similar in that both provide a data modeling layer that translates between business users’ drag-and-drop inputs to a database query.

The data modeling layer not only provides self-service analytics for business users but also provide a centralized management interface for data analysts to ensure that the data exposed is accurate, maintainable and reusable.

Both tools invented their own modeling language. Looker with LookML (Looker Modeling Language) and Holistics with AML (Analytics Modeling Language).

Terminologies: While the approaches are similar, both tools use slightly different terminologies

Initial Learning Curve

A key requirement for Looker users is the need to invest time to learn & setup the data modeling step. For Looker, this means learning and preparing the modeling work in LookML first, as an abstraction on top of a SQL database.

Learning LookML is not rocket science but still takes significant effort, thus creating a fairly high barrier of entry. As a result, only analysts who are willing to invest in Looker’s approach would go through the process of learning it.

Holistics’ data modeling, while also code-based, provide a simple, easy to use user interface to perform GUI-based data modeling. This removes the need to learn a new language for initial users. The only requirement is some minimal SQL knowledge to model some advanced use cases.

LookML vs AML

With both Looker and Holistics offering code-based, you can perform data modeling with tons of flexibility. Holistics AML tries to optimize for a better developer experience through auto-complete and instant feedback of errors. Their developer-first approach makes AML much easier to pick up and start developing than LookML. This similarity of the languages between the tool makes it easier for the developer to switch and adopt.