Looker vs Mode

Looker helps organizations explore, share, and visualize company data for business decisions. Its LookML semantic models define dimensions, aggregates, calculations, and relationships, then use those definitions to generate SQL queries. Gemini-powered natural-language analytics lets users ask questions, while Dashboard Agents provide summaries and explorations grounded in governed metrics. Looker connects to BigQuery, Spanner, Cloud SQL for MySQL, Cloud SQL for PostgreSQL, and other Google services. The Looker Marketplace offers applications, prebuilt LookML models, visualizations, and actions for delivering data to third-party services. Listed capabilities include hourly refresh, row-level security, scheduled reports, and embedded analytics. Deployment is hybrid, with web, Android, iOS, API, and self-hosted options. Mobile apps let users view Looks and dashboards. Google documents TLS 1.2 or later for data in transit and AES-256 encryption for locally stored sensitive application data. A free 14-day trial is advertised, but there is no free plan. Standard, Enterprise, and Embed each list one production instance, 10 Standard Users, and two Developer Users; their API call allowances differ. Pricing is on request.

Mode is a business intelligence platform that brings data teams and business teams together for analytics, from ad hoc analysis through self-serve reporting and advanced work. It offers a SQL editor with connected Python and R notebooks. Reports can combine explorable charts, output cells, and narrative text, while Visual Explorer supports browser exploration of more than 100,000 data points. Interactive dashboards provide drag-and-drop exploration, visualizations, custom themes, and scheduled runs. Teams can build internal data tools with HTML, CSS, JavaScript, APIs, parameters, and embedded reports. Listed integrations include dbt freshness, GitHub, Excel workbooks, Google Sheets, semantic layers, Slack, local file uploads, and webhooks. Mode connects to most major data warehouses but does not build SaaS-tool connectors. Studio supports up to three users and 10 MB per query. Pro lists 250 GB per month, 5 GB per query, and a three-user minimum; Enterprise requires at least 50 users. API and web access, scheduled queries, shared queries, SQL notebooks, and AI query assistance are listed. Data is encrypted with TLS 1.2 or higher in transit and AES-256 at rest.