Blog · Alternatives and comparisons
A practical guide to moving a team's questions off Looker: what to export, how the data maps, what carries over, and running both side by side.
Teams move a desk off Looker for ordinary reasons, and most keep it for other work. This guide is about the practical part: what to take out, what to bring, and how to check the new figures against the old ones.
The Scheduler can send Looks and Explores as a data table, visualisation, CSV, XLSX, JSON, text or HTML, and dashboards as PDF, visualisation or a zip of CSVs, to email, webhooks, Amazon S3, SFTP or admin-enabled integrations. The Looker API interfaces provide programmatic access, and because Looker queries the customer's own database the underlying data already sits outside Looker.
Exports of finished reports are useful for checking, but they are not what to move. The better source is the files underneath: the ledger, budget, sales or balance exports your systems produce before any analytics or planning tool touches them. Those are what Covirage reads.
| Desk | Files |
|---|---|
| Cost and FP&A | actuals, budget, forecast, headcount, timing and one-off items |
| Programme cost | budget by workstream, actuals, purchase orders, forecast and change requests |
| Commercial | sales by customer, product and month; market data, distribution and promotions if you have them |
| Bank income | balances and interest by product and segment; fees and account openings |
| Markets income | revenue by desk and client; market volumes and plan |
Column names do not need to match. On the data map every column is matched once, by name, and the mapping is reused every month after.
| Carries over | Rebuilt |
|---|---|
| Your definitions: accounts, periods, hierarchies, thresholds | Dashboard layouts and visuals |
| The questions people ask every month | Custom calculations, as tested measures |
| The exports your systems produce | Scheduled refreshes, as file delivery or a connection |
More on Looker alternatives, every source Covirage reads, and how to evaluate an analytics vendor.
Facts about other products were checked on 24 September 2026 from the pages below. Product names are trademarks of their owners; Covirage is not affiliated with them.
No. Most teams move one desk's recurring questions first and keep Looker for what it is built for. Running both for a month is the safest way to check the figures.
Not as dashboards. What carries over is the definitions: which accounts, which periods, which measures. They become the measures and the configuration we set up for you, and the answers are rebuilt from the source files.
For one desk with its exports in hand, set up is usually within a week. A custom configuration takes longer and is agreed with us first.