Looker and Tableau are prominent business intelligence (BI) tools, each with unique strengths and weaknesses, leaving businesses to choose based on their specific needs. Looker, part of Google Cloud Platform, offers a code-based approach with LookML, enabling strong data governance and accessible data analysis through its Explores, Views, Looks, and Dashboards. It facilitates self-service analytics but comes with a learning curve, especially for users unfamiliar with its dimensions and metrics. Tableau, owned by Salesforce, excels in offering complex, highly customizable data visualizations, making it popular in enterprise markets. It requires stronger technical skills for development but is intuitive for business users to interact with. Both tools face challenges in data governance at scale, often struggling with tracking data usage across numerous reports. Datafold Cloud's column-level lineage integration aims to bridge the gap between data transformation and BI tools, providing insights into data usage and potential impacts of upstream changes. Ultimately, the choice between Looker and Tableau depends on the technical level of end users, primary use cases, and the comfort level with users writing their own queries.