The Ecomm Analyst

Looker is not really priced for stores our size, and Google does not pretend otherwise. The pricing page lists three platform editions, Standard, Enterprise, and Embed, and every one of them says call sales. Cost splits into a platform fee for running the instance and a per-user license that varies by whether someone is a viewer, a standard user, or a developer. Each platform includes ten standard users and two developer users, and subscriptions come in one, two, and three-year terms. There is no monthly option and no free tier.

The bigger cost is not the license anyway. Looker runs on LookML, a modeling layer you write and maintain, which means the tool assumes you have someone whose job is to maintain it. That is a reasonable assumption at 500 employees and a bad one at fifteen. If you got here because someone quoted you Looker and you want to know what else exists, here are five options, roughly in order of how much setup they demand.

1. Looker Studio

Worth naming first because the shared branding confuses people constantly. Looker Studio is a different product from Looker. It is free, browser-based, and has no LookML layer, and it connects to GA4 and BigQuery natively. There is a paid Pro tier that adds team management and support, priced separately by Google. The honest limitation is that Looker Studio is a visualization layer with no modeling underneath it, so joining Shopify orders to ad spend means either paying for connectors or landing everything in BigQuery first. It is free until it isn’t.

2. Metabase

The closest thing to Looker that a small team can actually run. The open source edition is free and self-hosted with unlimited users. Cloud Starter is $100 a month for the first five users plus $6 per additional user, and Cloud Pro is $575 a month for the first ten plus $12 each after that. Enterprise starts at $20,000 a year. Annual billing saves ten percent, and both paid tiers come with a 14-day trial. Row-level permissions, SSO, and white-labeling all sit at Pro, which is the jump most teams end up making eventually.

3. Power BI

If your company already runs on Microsoft 365, Power BI is the cheapest serious BI tool you will find. Power BI Desktop is free for authoring. Pro is $14 per user per month paid yearly, and Premium Per User is $24, and Pro is bundled into Microsoft 365 E5 at no extra cost. The trap is on the viewing side. Everyone who opens a shared report needs their own paid license until you buy capacity, so a team of five analysts and forty viewers is forty-five licenses, not five. Model that before you commit.

4. ThoughtMetric

Different category, and I am including it because a lot of Looker evaluations start from the wrong premise. If the thing you want is attribution and channel reporting rather than a general query layer over a warehouse, a purpose-built tool gets you there without the modeling work. ThoughtMetric, which sponsors this blog, is $99 a month or $83 billed annually, with every feature available at every tier and a 14-day trial that does not ask for a card. It will not replace a warehouse or answer arbitrary SQL questions. It will tell you which ads produced which orders on day two rather than month three.

5. Databox

Built for the case where the deliverable is a dashboard someone actually looks at rather than an analytics environment. There is a free plan with three data sources and one dashboard, Analyst is $64 a month for five sources and one user, Pro is $159 with unlimited users and three sources included, and Growth is $399. All of those are annual prices, with monthly running twenty percent higher. Extra data sources are $5.60 a month each on Pro and above. Watch that counter, because each GA4 property and each ad account counts separately.

The question underneath the question

Most Looker evaluations I see at sub-$20M stores are really asking one of two things. Either you want a place to answer questions nobody anticipated, which means a warehouse and a query tool and someone to run both. Or you want the same eight numbers in front of the team every Monday, which means a dashboard product and a couple of connectors. Those are different purchases and the second one is much more common than people admit in the vendor call.

The comparison set here overlaps heavily with the one in Tableau alternatives for e-commerce reporting, and for good reason. Once you strip out the enterprise sales motion, the shortlist for a store under $20M in revenue is fairly short, and the deciding factor is almost always how many people need to see the output rather than how sophisticated the modeling gets.