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Birst vs Looker
March 15, 2025 | Author: Michael Stromann
8★
Infor Birst is the only Enterprise BI platform born in the cloud. Find out why more than a thousand businesses rely on Birst for Enterprise BI. Learn to think fast. Enterprise-caliber BI delivers accurate, actionable content in an intuitive, self-service business intelligence environment. It allows users to combine data from different source systems in a single BI platform to get answers to their most pressing business concerns in real time. And, when the questions change, it adapts quickly to the new request.
16★
Looker is a business intelligence software and big data analytics platform that helps you explore, analyze and share real-time business analytics easily.
Birst and Looker are both impressive, cloud-based business intelligence platforms, which, if you say it fast enough, sounds like something out of a sci-fi novel. They both let users wrangle vast quantities of data, generate lovely charts that make managers feel important and integrate with all sorts of mysterious databases. They also promise security, governance and data modeling—phrases that sound reassuring until you realize they basically mean "we've made it complicated so you don’t have to."
Birst, which emerged from the United States in 2004, was designed for big, sprawling enterprises with a worrying amount of data spread across multiple locations. It leans heavily into something called "networked BI," which is either a revolutionary approach to multi-source data consolidation or a polite way of saying "yes, we know your data is a mess and we’ll try to make sense of it." Infor scooped it up in 2017 and stuffed it into its ERP systems, which means if you're already knee-deep in enterprise software, you might as well throw Birst into the mix. It even boasts machine learning-powered data prep, which is a fancy way of saying "we’ll let the robots try first."
Looker, on the other hand, came along in 2012 with a sleek, modern and somewhat smugly cloud-native approach. It introduced LookML, a proprietary modeling language that developers find either revolutionary or maddening, depending on how much coffee they’ve had. Unlike Birst, it’s all about real-time analytics and embedding dashboards into anything that will sit still long enough. Google Cloud acquired Looker in 2020, presumably because it hadn’t yet absorbed every other analytics platform in existence. Now, it’s the go-to for companies that love SQL, live in Google’s ecosystem and enjoy feeling like they’re at the cutting edge of data-driven decision-making, even if they still rely on gut instinct most of the time.
See also: Top 10 Business Intelligence software
Birst, which emerged from the United States in 2004, was designed for big, sprawling enterprises with a worrying amount of data spread across multiple locations. It leans heavily into something called "networked BI," which is either a revolutionary approach to multi-source data consolidation or a polite way of saying "yes, we know your data is a mess and we’ll try to make sense of it." Infor scooped it up in 2017 and stuffed it into its ERP systems, which means if you're already knee-deep in enterprise software, you might as well throw Birst into the mix. It even boasts machine learning-powered data prep, which is a fancy way of saying "we’ll let the robots try first."
Looker, on the other hand, came along in 2012 with a sleek, modern and somewhat smugly cloud-native approach. It introduced LookML, a proprietary modeling language that developers find either revolutionary or maddening, depending on how much coffee they’ve had. Unlike Birst, it’s all about real-time analytics and embedding dashboards into anything that will sit still long enough. Google Cloud acquired Looker in 2020, presumably because it hadn’t yet absorbed every other analytics platform in existence. Now, it’s the go-to for companies that love SQL, live in Google’s ecosystem and enjoy feeling like they’re at the cutting edge of data-driven decision-making, even if they still rely on gut instinct most of the time.
See also: Top 10 Business Intelligence software
