Looker Studio Vs Amplitude Simplified: 6 Critical Differences

In this blog, you will understand what Looker and Amplitude do. You will come across a detailed comparison of both the tools based on a few important factors which will help you consciously decide which suits your requirements the best.

Many of our customers at Hevo come to us with this very question “ Looker Studio and Amplitude are both pioneers in their field but which one to choose?”. More importantly, it is about what works better for you. So let’s dive into Looker Vs Amplitude without any further ado.

Introduction to Looker Studio

1. Looker Studio is a cloud Business Intelligence tool that helps its customers analyze sales, marketing, and web data in real-time. Any person from the company who has access can create dashboards and view them. Looker is integrated with Google Cloud and works on top of a traditional or cloud database.
2. The dashboards once created are accessible to anyone within the organization. They contain funnels, maps, timelines, workflows, tree-maps, combined charts, and custom visualizations that you can create, and many more basic visualizations.
3. All kinds of industries use Looker for their data from various departments. Basically, Looker creates an SQL data model. So this data model helps in code re-usability which makes redundant tasks less time-consuming. 

Introduction to Amplitude

1. Amplitude specializes in product intelligence. It automates the extraction of data and analyzes the performance of products and customer satisfaction.
2. It allows the production and design teams to draw insights and build better products. User behaviour both on mobile applications and browsers is analyzed in terms of events.
3. Anything a user does is called an event which gives the granular breakup of user experience. It also helps with the retention of customers and analysis of churned customers by providing valuable insights. B2B, e-commerce, Fintech, and Media organizations use Amplitude.

Comprehensive Analysis of Looker and Amplitude

Feature	Looker	Amplitude
Core Offering	Business Intelligence with data modeling.	Product analytics with ML algorithms for user behavior insights.
Key Features	Notifications (email, Slack), embedded analytics, granular insights, excellent security, APIs.	Workflow visualizations, retention analysis, behavioral targeting, automation of data management.
Database Support	Works on relational databases; generates SQL queries and fetches results.	Supports relational databases; focuses on user-centric analytics.
Security	Provides robust security measures.	Follows high-security standards.
Performance	High-quality insights with SQL-based queries.	High-performance speed for quick analysis.

Here’s a list of some of the most crucial factors that you must consider while comparing platforms such as Looker and Amplitude. Selecting the right tool for your business needs has never been this easy:

• Features
• Performance 
• Integrations
• Ease of Usage
• Pricing
• Security

Looker Studio Vs Amplitude: Features

Looker Studio Key Features

• Looker provides Business Intelligence with data modeling, allows notifications on mail and slack, supports embedded analytics, granular insights, customer support, and amazing security with customized pricing on browsers.
• It works on top of a database and generates SQL queries and gets the results back. It supports only Relational Databases as of now. Looker also has an API that it supports.

Amplitude’s Key Features

• Amplitude offers ML algorithms to identify the best and worst user product experiences.
• It also offers workflow visualizations for analyzing customer retention, helps in analyzing what made users valuable to their product growth, follows great security standards, provides high-performance speed, has great customer support, product analytics, behavioural targeting, and collaboration with the automation of data management.
• Amplitude only works with Relational Databases as of now.

Looker Studio Vs Amplitude: Performance

Looker’s Performance

• Looker’s dashboards load slower because multiple queries run on the database simultaneously, the amount of data to be fetched is high and since it provides real-time dashboards to everyone, the load on the server is high.
• To tackle these Looker recommends some best practices that help in optimizing the performance. Also, you can contact the Looker team to help you with these issues.

Amplitude’s Performance

• Amplitude is faster than Looker in terms of speed. When a user does something you can see it on Amplitude within seconds.
• Though it is not as diverse as Looker in terms of features, users claim to have an excellent experience in terms of its performance and product growth.
• Amplitude builds the dashboards where the algorithm tells the company what they need to focus on to improve the product experience.
• It tells you the questions that need to be answered and at the same time provides insights for answering them.

Looker Studio Vs Amplitude: Integrations

Looker’s Integrations

• Looker offers 50+ SQL database integrations. A few are provided in the image below and if you cannot find the database you need, you can get in touch with the Looker team and they will guide you through more information.
• Looker only integrates with Relational Databases. Checkout their integrations on their official website.

Amplitude’s Integrations

• Amplitude integrates with not just databases but also BI tools, data warehouses, some SaaS applications.
• In the image below you can see that these integrations are divided into categories.

Looker Studio Vs Amplitude: Ease of Usage

Looker’s Ease of Usage

• Looker needs a good amount of time for setup. But you don’t need to worry because all the instructions are given in their Looker Studio documentation where there is a detailed explanation about how to configure and connect your database to Looker.

Amplitude’s Ease of Usage

In terms of ease of setup, administration, and usage Amplitude is better than Looker. But official documentation is not so easy to find on their webpage.

Looker Vs Amplitude: Pricing

	Looker	Amplitude
Pricing model	Looker has a Quote-Based pricing model.	Amplitude has 3 types of pricing tiers: Free, Growth, and Enterprise.
Price	To know about the price, contact the Looker team.	Free: Free of Cost. Growth: Contact the Amplitude sales team. Enterprise: Contact the Amplitude sales team.
Features	All the features can be availed by anyone subscribed to Looker.	Each pricing plan has different features

Looker Vs Amplitude: Security

	Looker	Amplitude
SOC 2 compliant	Yes	Yes
ISO 27001 certified	Yes	Yes
GDPR compliant	Yes	Yes
HIPAA compliant	Yes	No
EU shield	Yes	Yes
PCI DSS compliant	Yes	No

Conclusion

In conclusion, you will understand that both Looker and Amplitude have amazing platforms for data analysis. But if you are just starting out then it is better to optimize the product and user experience by using Amplitude because in the initial stages you can manage data on your own without the help of Looker.

Integrating and analyzing data from a huge set of diverse sources can be challenging, this is where Hevo Data comes into the picture.

Sign up for the 14-day free trial and experience the feature-rich Hevo suite first hand. You can have a look at our unbeatable pricing that will help you choose the right plan for your business needs!
Share your experience of learning about Looker vs Amplitude. Tell us in the comments below!

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