Sigma vs Looker vs Knowi
Which of the three BI tools best suits your business needs?
Table of Contents:
- User Friendliness
- Speed of Implementation
- Integration with Data sources
- Data Modelling
- Visualizations
- Natural Language Processing
- Multi-source Joins
- Embedded Analytics
- Alerts
- Customer Support
- Pricing
Sigma vs Looker vs Knowi- Final Thoughts
Introduction
In 2020, the global Business Intelligence (BI) industry was valued at $22.26 billion, with a global adoption rate of 26%. That means that in an organizational department of 100 staff, about 26 of them would use BI tools regularly. The value of the industry grew to $24.05% in 2021 and is predicted to hit $43.03 billion in 2028. One of the key factors contributing to the growth of this industry is the increasing demand for real-time insights.
Sigma vs Looker vs Knowi are some of the popular BI tools in the market. But which is the best BI tool for your company among the three? This article is a three-way comparison of these three BI tools to help you choose the best one for your company. But first, let’s have a quick overview of each of the three BI tools.
Sigma
Sigma is a business intelligence and analytics platform built for the cloud. Sigma was meant to increase speed to insights by using Snowflake’s lightning-fast computing power combined with the familiarity of spreadsheets. Any Sigma user can use the spreadsheet formulas and functions they already know to explore live data at the cloud scale and extract the lowest grain of detail. The BI tool has a spreadsheet-like interface that delivers the full power of SQL into the hands of its users while keeping data secure and fresh within cloud data warehouses.
Sigma provides code-free and code-friendly data visualization and manipulation, enabling customers to slice and dice data in every possible combination.
Looker
Looker is an enterprise platform for data applications, business intelligence, and embedded analytics. It was founded in 2011 and acquired by Google in 2019. Looker makes data collection, analysis, and visualization easier for both small and larger organizations. It is a browser-based BI tool with a unique modeling language, LookML.
Looker comes with various interactive charts and graphs that you can use to visualize your data. Looker is also easy to use and it can be integrated with databases and big data platforms. The tool has a link-sharing feature that allows teams to collaborate on a project.
Knowi
Knowi is a unified analytics platform from raw data all the way to business users. Knowi achieves this through the use of data virtualization so that you don’t have to take your data through the ETL process. This makes Knowi unique from other BI tools such as Sigma and Looker. Knowi supports native integration with NoSQL databases, allowing users to analyze unstructured data directly, a feature not provided by traditional BI tools. Knowi supports over 30 different visualizations that you can use to present your data visually. It has a powerful search-based analytics feature powered by AI that allows users to ask questions in plain English and get answers across their data.
Sigma vs Looker vs Knowi
Now, let’s discuss how these three BI tools compare in the following 11 core areas:
- User Friendliness
- Speed of Implementation
- Integration with Data sources
- Data Modelling
- Visualizations
- Natural Language Processing
- Multi-source Joins
- Embedded Analytics
- Alerts
- Customer Support
- Pricing
User Friendliness
Sigma is a simple BI tool to use, allowing users to work with billions of data rows without special training. It gives everyone, including non-technical users, the ability to directly query the data warehouse using an intuitive spreadsheet UI using familiar functions and formulas. Sigma allows analysts to leverage their existing expertise and save both time and resources.
Looker also comes with a user-friendly user interface. If you are not interested in deep data drilling, Looker can give you clean and simple design aesthetics. However, using Looker requires learning its built-in proprietary language, LookML, which has a steep learning curve and can be time-consuming to set up.
Knowi has a simple, intuitive, and customizable business user interface.
Its user interface for data engineers is sophisticated but might take a bit of time to get used to.
Speed of Implementation
Sigma users create analytics in an environment that is similar to a spreadsheet and establish direct connections to tables in the database, decreasing the reporting speed. Sigma also comes with templates to reduce the time to implementation.
In Looker, data has to be modeled into LookML projects, explores, and views before it can be used in dashboards. This increases the time investment in the initial setup and creates bottlenecks in future developments and maintenance. Organizations may also have to train their users on uncommon LookML syntax or find a new hire with LookML skills.
Knowi provides a unique Dataset-as-a-Service layer that provides a trusted, reusable set of data models across the Business. It uses the concept of “data virtualization” to reduce the time from raw data to insights. Once connected to a data source, Knowi serves as a layer that sits on top of the data source. This allows users to query the underlying data source immediately, eliminating the need for cumbersome ETL processes. Once the query is saved, it becomes a virtual, reusable dataset that is tracked and stored in Knowi’s ElasticStore data warehouse. The dataset can then be used to create visualizations and reports, joined with other datasets, and other downstream analytics.
Integration with Data Sources
Sigma supports integration with a number of external data sources. Sigma users can source data from the cloud data warehouse, uploaded CVs, Sigma datasets, and written SQL. However, its list of pre-built integrations is not extensive, but it offers more technical users the ability to create custom plugins and visualize what they can code.
Looker only supports integration with SQL data sources. To analyze data stored in NoSQL, REST APIs, files, etc, users must first put the data in some form of an SQL database for Looker to query against.
Knowi can be integrated with more than 36 structured and unstructured data sources like MongoDB, Elasticsearch, Apache Cassandra, and others.
Unlike other BI tools, Knowi comes with native connectors to NoSQL data sources, relieving you from the need to install third-party drivers. Knowi is also fully native without the need to “relationalize” the data.
Data Modelling
Sigma is a cloud-native tool that makes your warehoused data instantly accessible to users. You can augment your warehouse tables or CSVs with your own embellishments and then publish those for reuse within your organization. You can also visually manage every transformation and dataset reference from a single view, enabling you to explore each component that contributes to your workbook analysis.
Looker’s data model provides a fresh, consistent, and governed real-time view of your data, from across multiple clouds, to your entire organization. Looker maintains a live connection to your data source, hence, the data is not imported into Looker. However, your data may be stored temporarily in an in-memory cache for better performance.
Knowi provides a number of data strategy options to its users. It can query directly against any data source. The query results can be stored in Knowi, thereby reducing the cost of data warehouses like Snowflake. Resulting queries can also be put into a new table within Snowflake or Redshift (DBWrite).
Visualizations
Sigma comes with a wide variety of chart options for visualizing data, including line, bar, KPI, combo, scatter, box, funnel, and other charts. Sigma visualizations also have various properties and formatting options that determine how your data is presented.
The customizable configurations enhance your visualizations and ensure they present actionable and meaningful information.
Just like Sigma, Looker comes with a wide variety of visualization options for presenting data. Each visualization has unique settings that can be used to customize its look. Examples of these visualizations include cartesian charts, pie and donut charts, progression charts, texts, maps, and tables.
Knowi users can create customizable dashboards and visualizations. It has more than 30 different types of visualizations that can be used to present data visually. Knowi has also introduced the Presenter Mode that allows users to display charts and plain English insights next to each other. Knowi users with JavaScript skills can also create custom visualizations to meet their specific needs.
Natural Language Processing
Sigma doesn’t have natural language processing capabilities. Instead, it enables users to freely analyze data using a familiar spreadsheet-like interface. This allows users to work with billions of rows without special training.
Just like Sigma, Looker doesn’t have natural language processing capabilities. Instead, it comes with analytics code blocks, that is, Looker Blocks, with SQL patterns, data models, and visualizations included. Users can customize the blocks to meet their individual needs. Looker’s data modeling layer also presents raw data in a simple way.
Knowi has a search-driven analytics feature powered by natural language processing. This feature allows Knowi users to ask questions in plain English and get answers in the form of tables, charts, and graphs. Knowi has also introduced this feature on Slack and Microsoft Teams, allowing users to ask questions directly from these apps and get instant answers. Knowi has also integrated with ChatGPT and OpenAI to make querying and presenting real-world context on dashboards much easier. It has a Query Assist feature that generates appropriate queries in the right dialect from plain English. Knowi’s data virtualization feature also makes it easy for users to query data. Recently, Knowi introduced the InstantSights feature that summarizes your dataset in plain English, with predictions, summaries, Top/Bottom N, etc.
Multi-source Joins
Sigma allows users to join data between datasets or warehouse tables. It supports different types of joins including INNER JOIN, LOOKUP JOIN, LEFT OUTER JOIN, FULL OUTER JOIN, and RIGHT OUTER JOIN.
The joins are based on a common field among the sources.
Looker does not join data between databases, but queries are run on individual databases. However, it is possible to create Looker dashboards and reports that use data from two different data sources.
Knowi users can join data across multiple data sources to blend and store combined data. The join operations are also based on a common field among the data sources. Knowi supports INNER JOIN, LEFT OUTER JOIN, FULL OUTER JOIN, RIGHT OUTER JOIN, and LOOP JOIN. The INNER JOIN is used as the default join operation.
Knowi was designed to support large-scale join operations across millions of records over multiple data sources. Knowi provides its users with mechanisms to optimize the join operations for faster processing.
Embedded Analytics
Sigma has a workbook embedding feature that enables you to display your workbooks and data elements in other internal or external facing applications. The embed data will update in real time as it responds to updates in your warehouse. It also supports three types of embedding: public, private, and application.
Public embeds are visible to anyone with the embed URL. Private embeds are only visible to the Sigma organization’s members who have been granted access to the workbook. Application embedding allows you to securely embed your data without requiring users to authenticate through Sigma.
Looker has the Powered By Looker (PBL) feature to help users embed sophisticated analytics directly into their websites or applications. This feature allows Looker to offer its full functionality as an external service.
Knowi has several options for implementing embedded analytics. You can generate a URL of your dashboard and embed it in an external application. You can also create a secure URL that uses parameters to restrict the data that users see. Knowi also provides the Single SignOn API that facilitates token exchange from users in your system to map to Knowi with user rights and permissions.
Alerts
Sigma has an alerts/notifications feature that sends conditional messages via Slack or E-mail based on KPIs or missing data. It also shares workbooks, their pages, or individual elements via these channels on a set schedule or as-needed basis.
Looker also has an alerts/notifications feature that allows you to specify conditions in your data that when met or exceeded, will trigger notifications to be sent to specific recipients at the desired frequency. The alerts are sent via Slack or email.
Knowi has an alerts feature to help you stay on top of important changes that may occur in your data or business. The alerts enhance data management by sending real-time notifications when specific conditions, thresholds, and anomalies are detected within your data. Users can also set up alerts directly on a widget based on an anomaly, threshold, or custom condition in the data. The alert notifications can be sent via, webhook, email, or Slack.
Customer Support
Sigma has a help desk where users can type questions and get answers in the form of articles. As a user types a question, they get the top article suggestions most likely to answer their question.
Sigma has many written tutorials on how to use the BI tool. They also organize live training, user meetups, and more to help users learn more about Sigma. If you don’t find an answer to your question, you can contact them via their live chat support feature or submit a request.
Looker moved its documentation and Help Center to cloud.google.com in August 2022. This comes after its merger with Google Data Studio. They’ve also gotten rid of their US support. There is a section for Looker Best Practices with pages about Looker best practices, as well as how-to guides on how to use the tool. They have a Contact Us button that you can click to chat online with the Google Cloud sales team available Monday 9 AM ET, through Friday, 9 PM ET. You can also request a callback by filling out a contact form with your information and they will get back to you.
Just like Sigma, Knowi has a knowledge base where users can type their questions and get answers in the form of articles. As a user types a question, they get the top article suggestions that may answer their question.
Knowi also comes with release notes on how to use the BI tool. The tool has also created a community forum with sourced questions and answers that can help users. They also have a chat system powered by Zendesk that allows users to submit their tickets through which they can get back to them with answers to their questions.
Pricing
Sigma has not made its pricing details publicly available. It has a customized pricing approach where they create a suitable pricing plan for you depending on your needs. Sigma has a 14-day free trial period.
Looker has not made its pricing information publicly available. Looker offers a customized approach where they create a suitable pricing structure for different businesses based on their needs. They have the “Request a quote” button on their website that you can click and get a price quote for Looker multi-cloud options, Looker Embedded, Looker Modeler, or Looker Studio Pro. Looker (Google Cloud Core) has four pricing plans namely Standard (monthly subscription), Standard (annual), Enterprise (annual), and Embed (annual). The Standard (monthly subscription) plan costs $5,000/month. You can contact the sales team for pricing information about the other plans.
Knowi has not made its pricing information publicly available. Instead, they have provided a form on their website that you can fill out to request pricing information. They have three pricing plans namely Basic, Team, and Enterprise. Each plan comes with full onboarding and technical support. Knowi also offers discounts for startups and non-profits. It doesn’t charge for email reports that require a user etc. in other systems.
Sigma vs Looker vs Knowi- Final Thoughts
From the above comparison, you can tell that each of the three BI tools comes with its own uniqueness. Each tool also has its own pros as well as cons that can be associated with its unique features.
Sigma is suitable for small or medium-sized enterprises looking for a BI tool with a user-friendly and intuitive user interface for users of all skill levels to learn and use the platform. Sigma users can query the data warehouse using an intuitive spreadsheet UI using familiar functions and formulas.
Looker is a suitable BI platform for an enterprise that is looking for a simple tool to generate simple and customizable visualizations. Its flexible pricing plan is also good for small and medium-sized companies.
If you are looking for a BI tool with a flexible pricing plan and capable of working with Unstructured data, choose Knowi. It allows you to connect directly to NoSQL data sources without relying on third-party drivers and shortens your journey from raw data to data-based business decisions.
