Geckoboard vs Looker

Geckoboard is a London-based company that makes live KPI dashboards designed to be shown on office TV screens, shared in Slack or sent as snapshots. Its focus is visibility rather than analysis: a support or sales team should be able to glance at a screen and know how today is going.

Dashboards are built with a simple drag-and-drop editor that connects to around 80 data sources, including Zendesk, HubSpot, Salesforce, Intercom, Google Analytics, Google Sheets, Excel and SQL databases, plus a Datasets API for custom data. Widgets show numbers, goals, leaderboards, and line and bar charts with status colors, and a dedicated TV mode handles rotation, layout and readability at a distance. Scheduled Slack and email sharing pushes the same metrics to remote staff. Pricing is a monthly subscription by number of dashboards and features, starting with an Essentials plan for two dashboards; there is a 14-day trial but no free plan.

Geckoboard fits customer support, sales and operations teams that want shared, always-on metrics with minimal setup. It is not a BI tool: there is little room for ad hoc exploration, joins or deep drill-downs, and the cost per dashboard is high compared with free options. Databox connects more sources and adds goal tracking for agencies, Klipfolio is more flexible but harder to build in, and Looker Studio or Grafana are free if you can handle the setup yourself.

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.