Compare Grafana vs. Looker

Grafana Labs provides an open and composable observability stack built around Grafana, the leading open source technology for dashboards and visualization. Recognized as a 2025 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ Leader for Observability Platforms and positioned furthest to the right for Completeness of Vision, Grafana Labs supports over 25M users and 5,000+ customers. Grafana Cloud delivers the full power of Grafana’s open and composable observability stack—without the overhead of managing infrastructure. As a fully managed SaaS offering from Grafana Labs, it unifies metrics, logs, and traces in one place, giving engineering teams real-time visibility into systems and applications. Built around the LGTM Stack—Loki for logs, Grafana for visualization, Tempo for traces, and Mimir for metrics—Grafana Cloud provides a scalable foundation for modern observability. With built-in integrations for Kubernetes, cloud services, CI/CD pipelines, and OpenTelemetry, Grafana Cloud accelerates time to value while reducing operational complexity. Grafana Cloud also supports OLAP-style analytics through integrations with data warehouses and analytical engines like BigQuery, ClickHouse, and Druid—enabling multi-dimensional exploration across observability and business data. Teams gain access to powerful features like Adaptive Metrics for cost optimization, incident response workflows, and synthetic monitoring for performance testing—all within a secure, globally distributed platform. Whether you’re modernizing infrastructure, scaling observability, or driving SLO-based performance, Grafana Cloud delivers the insights you need—fast, flexible, and vendor-neutral.

Looker reinvents the way business intelligence (BI) works by delivering an entirely new kind of data discovery solution that modernizes BI in three important ways. A simplified web-based stack leverages our 100% in-database architecture, so customers can operate on big data and find the last mile of value in the new era of fast analytic databases. An agile development environment enables today’s data rockstars to model the data and create end-user experiences that make sense for each specific business, transforming data on the way out, rather than on the way in. At the same time, a self-service data-discovery experience works the way the web works, empowering business users to drill into and explore very large datasets without ever leaving the browser. As a result, Looker customers enjoy the power of traditional BI at the speed of the web.