Domo vs Looker

Domo is a cloud business intelligence platform founded in 2010 in Utah by Josh James, co-founder of Omniture, and listed on Nasdaq in 2018. It combines data integration, dashboards, low-code apps and AI in one hosted product aimed at business teams, not only analysts. In September 2026 Progress Software completed a $400 million acquisition of Domo's AI and data platform business, so Domo now sits inside Progress's data portfolio.

The platform includes 1,000+ prebuilt connectors, drag-and-drop Magic ETL, Cloud Amplifier for querying Snowflake, BigQuery or Databricks without copying data, charts and dashboards, scheduled reports and alerts, App Studio for low-code data apps, embedded analytics for customer-facing reporting, workflows and AI agents with governed model management. Pricing is credit-based: you buy a pool of credits consumed by storage, data refreshes, workflows and AI, with unlimited users and a 30-day free trial.

Domo fits mid-size and large companies that want one vendor for pipelines and dashboards and value mobile, executive-friendly reporting. Power BI is far cheaper for Microsoft shops, Tableau has deeper visual analytics, and Looker Studio or Metabase cover simpler needs for little or no cost. Credit consumption can be hard to forecast, and independent estimates put typical contracts in the tens of thousands of dollars per year.

Buying tip: because of the Progress acquisition, ask about roadmap, support continuity and contract terms before renewing or signing a multi-year deal, and model credit burn on your real refresh schedules during the trial.

Looker is Google Cloud's enterprise business intelligence and embedded analytics platform. It was founded in 2012 in Santa Cruz, California, by Lloyd Tabb and Ben Porterfield, and Google completed its $2.6 billion acquisition in February 2020. Its core job: give a company one governed definition of every metric through the LookML semantic layer, then let people explore, dashboard and embed that data without writing SQL.

Looker queries your warehouse directly (BigQuery, Snowflake, Redshift, Databricks and many SQL databases) instead of copying data into its own store. Developers model joins, dimensions and measures in LookML with Git version control; business users work in Explores, dashboards, scheduled deliveries and alerts. Gemini adds conversational analytics (GA in November 2025). It is sold as Standard (under 50 users), Enterprise and Embed editions on annual commitments, each including 10 standard and 2 developer users.

Looker fits data teams that want strict metric governance or need to embed analytics in a product. It is costly, needs LookML skills and is overkill for a few dashboards. Power BI is cheaper for Microsoft shops, Tableau is stronger for visual exploration, and Metabase is far simpler and open source. Google's free Data Studio covers basic reporting.

In April 2026 Google renamed Looker Studio back to Data Studio, leaving Looker as the enterprise brand. Before buying, run the 30-day trial instance, which has Standard edition features but caps users at 5 Viewer, 1 Standard and 1 Developer; it converts to a paid Standard instance unless you delete it.