Reveal vs Looker: Forget iFrames and Per-User Fees
Reveal vs Looker: Forget iFrames and Per-User Fees
Reveal provides true embedded analytics with an SDK-first, API-driven design. Looker forces you through LookML and iFrames, adding friction, complexity, and rising costs. With Reveal, you get faster integration, full white-label control, and predictable pricing that scales without limits.
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Why Teams Switch off Looker
Looker fits well for companies already invested in Google Cloud, particularly for internal analytics. However, when embedding, customization, and speed matter, product teams often encounter limits. LookML adds complexity, and iFrame-based delivery restricts performance and UI control.
Reveal removes these frictions and ensures:
More Flexibility
No rigid LookML requirement.
Better Embedding
Built-in SDK vs. third-party connectors.
Faster Setup
No steep learning curve.
Easier UI Customization
Full control over styling and layout.
Reveal vs. Looker
Looker was built to serve enterprise analysts, not product users. Its architecture ties you to proprietary modeling, heavy infrastructure, and a delivery model better suited for back-office reporting than in-app experiences. Reveal flips that approach. It’s lightweight, API-first, and designed to embed directly into your product, so you deliver analytics your customers use, without adding dev drag or hidden costs.
| Feature | Reveal | Looker |
|---|---|---|
Custom UI  | Full Control | Limited |
| Data Modeling | Optional | Mandatory (LookML) |
| Pricing | Flat Rate | Enterprise Tiered |
| Embedding | SDK-Based | iFrame/Custom Embed |
| Setup Time | Days | Weeks |
Why Reveal?
True SDK Integration, Not iFrame Workarounds
Reveal delivers embedded analytics through a true SDK, giving you direct access to APIs, native components, and complete control over how dashboards look and behave. The result is analytics that feels like part of your product, not a separate layer. Looker, by contrast, still relies heavily on iFrames, which limit customization and leave analytics feeling disconnected.
Predictable Pricing That Doesn’t Punish Growth
Reveal’s pricing is flat and predictable, ensuring unlimited users, no hidden fees, and no usage penalties. Adoption spikes don’t raise your bill, which means scaling analytics adds value to your product, not cost to your budget. Looker’s per-user model does the opposite: every new seat increases your spend, making growth harder to forecast and justify.
Full White-Label Control for a Native UX
Reveal embeds directly into your codebase, giving you DOM-level control over styling, theming, and behavior. Dashboards inherit your product’s design system so they’re indistinguishable from features you built yourself. Looker’s iFrame-based approach can’t erase its own visual footprint, leaving users with an experience that feels bolted-on instead of native.
Built to Scale with Real-Time Performance
Reveal is built for SaaS scalability, featuring a multi-tenant architecture and real-time dashboards that remain responsive even under heavy load. Even as usage spikes and data volumes grow, analytics performance doesn’t break or slow your product experience. Looker’s reliance on LookML and query-heavy models often creates bottlenecks at scale, delaying insights and frustrating end users.
Dev-Friendly, Without LookML Complexity
Reveal integrates seamlessly with your tech stack using a JavaScript client library compatible with Angular, React, Blazor, Vue, and more, plus server packages for .NET Core, NodeJS, and Java.
Developers work in familiar frameworks and APIs, with no new modeling language or detours. That means faster onboarding and dashboards live in your product in weeks, not months. Looker forces teams into LookML, a proprietary layer that slows delivery and locks your product to skills that can’t be reused elsewhere.
This is the magic. On the fly, we transform data from disparate data sources into visual displays that the brain can understand and act on.
Jim Richardson
President of
Atanasoft
Jim Richardson
President of
Atanasoft
What People are Saying About Reveal
I’ve been using Reveal BI for 1 week, and I must say it is completely awesome. I like the intuitive user interface, seamless integration, responsive customer support, powerful visualization tools, real-time analysis, and the best security measures.
The Reveal SDK is ideal for detecting errors in the programming language and creating Add-ons to increase and complement the interfaces and functions that we want to develop.
Reveal has established excellent base for our customers and sales team to explore and raise their concerns on our products and services. It has been able to streamline and our relationship ecosystem that has boosted the growth of our company. I have met and addressed many challenges that affect our customers and solved them to enable them trust our services increase pipeline leads.
Reveal has driven our business performance to great and recommendable lengths. It is very powerful and result achievement product that I highly recommend to any growing business.
With embedded evidence our company teams are able to drive data insights effectively. It anlyses our data automatically and recommends on the most relevant customer markets. With a simple to use interface we are able to create and customize our dashboard and visualizations.
If you have worked with power bi or Qlik view, You would rather use Reveal as it is easier to use and more user friendly. The learning curve to use the software is easy and overall the software is great!
Frequently Asked Questions
Reveal was built SDK-first, so analytics lives inside your product rather than in iFrames. That gives you full control over performance, customization, and user experience. Looker was designed as an enterprise BI tool first, which is why embedding often feels bolted on. Companies that want modern, product-native analytics choose Reveal.
Yes. Reveal supports full white-label analytics, so you can match dashboards to your product’s design system. This includes control over themes, layouts, and interactions, making dashboards indistinguishable from features you built yourself. Looker provides only limited theming and often carries its own visual footprint.
With Reveal, analytics is embedded directly into your application codebase using a JavaScript client library compatible with Angular, React, Blazor, Vue, and more, plus server packages for .NET Core, NodeJS, and Java.
This approach avoids iFrames and creates a seamless in-app experience where analytics feels like part of your product. Learn more about embedded analytics and how it improves adoption.
Most SaaS teams integrate Reveal in a matter of weeks using familiar APIs. Looker requires developers to learn LookML and rely on iFrame embedding, which slows projects and increases complexity. Reveal’s embedded analytics features are designed to shorten delivery timelines without burdening your dev team.
Reveal includes AI-powered analytics such as natural language queries and predictive insights. Users can ask questions, forecast outcomes, and interact with data inside the product, which improves decision-making without requiring technical expertise.
Yes. Reveal supports live dashboards that stay responsive even under heavy use. Looker, by comparison, often relies on scheduled queries or batch refreshes, which can create delays in surfacing insights.
Reveal connects to dozens of data sources, including the most common SQL databases, REST APIs, cloud platforms, and in-memory engines. This flexibility lets teams consolidate multiple streams of information into a single analytics experience. A full list of supported data sources is available for teams needing diverse integrations.
Reveal provides frequent product updates and direct developer-focused support. Because it was designed specifically for embedded use cases, its roadmap is driven by you, the customer. This makes improvements and fixes faster and more aligned with SaaS needs.
Reveal uses fixed, transparent pricing that includes unlimited users. This makes growth predictable and cost-effective. Looker follows a per-user pricing structure, which increases costs as adoption expands and makes long-term planning more difficult.
Yes. Reveal offers complete control over design, so dashboards inherit your fonts, colors, and layout. This ensures analytics blends seamlessly into your product’s experience. With Looker, dashboards often retain elements of their own UI, which reduces the sense of native integration.
Ready for The Best Looker Alternative?
Reveal offers modern embedding, absolute developer control, and flat pricing that scales with you.
Got questions? Book a 1:1 call with our consultants to see how Reveal can help you go live faster and scale smarter.
