DashThis vs. Looker Studio

I have used DashThis with all my clients, because it is the fastest, easiest, and best-developed reporting platform. I have tried Google Data Studio and many other reporting integrations, but they just don't have the speed or capabilities of DashThis. With in-depth filtering, you can create reporting modules not available in any other dashboard, like deep source-medium targeting or landing page data, etc. Whatever data you need, you can get access. Their API integrations are increasing all the time, and if they don't currently connect to something, request access.

Incentivized

Does great at open canvas editing and letting you fully customize without the need for a grid. It is democratizing self-service no-code analytics. You do not need to be a data or analytics engineer to get started, and you can go very far based on how intuitive and straightforward the UI is. Some of the biggest challenges with Looker Studio relate to user management/security, embedding options, and issue support. For a long time, every user needed to have a Gmail to invite them to view a dashboard via login, not sure if that has been improved yet. You can let any user view without logging in, but that is not always recommended due to security reasons. In terms of embedding, you can only iframe dashboards. More sophisticated BI tools let you embed elements via API or Javascript. Iframing dashboards also make drill downs and dashboard to dashboard navigation tricky/near impossible. There is also no ability to contact Google for support when bugs or outages happen. They point everyone to the Data Studio community. There is some ability to get in contact with Google if you have an enterprise-level contract with Google Cloud, but the path for support is very ad hoc and not always fruitful.

Incentivized

• Displaying data in a clear and aesthetically pleasing way
• Integrating with most of the systems you use on a regular basis in web design and digital marketing
• Allowing you to quickly create new charts/graphs/reports for clients

Incentivized

• Self-service
• Easy to use, point and click
• Little to no training required
• Easy to share internally and externally
• Rich visualizations
• Canned reports
• Easy to copy/paste/dupe existing reports
• Ability to join data sets
• Easy integration with various data sources
• Flexible data integrations, including lowest common denominator (CSV, XLS, G-Sheets)
• Wide range of APIs
• Secure / authentication via Google SSO
• Easy to share / re-assign ownership of reports and data sources

Incentivized

• I'm interested in implementing more tools into the system, such as Google My Business or OpenTable to truly make it a universal analytics dashboard.
• Instead of just month over month date ranges, I would also like to see a YTD date range.

Incentivized

• Few functionalities are very exclusive only for data studio.
• It's time taking to load data and at the same time only single Data source can be connected.
• When editing the reports you have to switch between Edit and View mode to see how does the change looks like.

It is the simplest and least expensive way for us to automate our reporting at this time. I like the ability to customize literally everything about each report, and the ability to send out reports automatically in emails. The only issue we have been having recently is a technical glitch in the automatic email report. Sadly, there is almost no support for this tool from Google, but is also free, so that is important to take into consideration

Incentivized

Google Data Studio has a clean interface that follows a lot of UX best practices. It is fairly easy to pick up the first time you use it, and there is a lot of documentation on line to help troubleshoot, if needed

Incentivized

I always get a same day response to my questions and they reach out enough that I feel like I can ask questions but not too much that I get annoyed.

Incentivized

I give it a lower support rating because it seems like our Dev team hasn't gotten the support they need to set up our database to connect. Seems like we hit a roadblock and the project got put on pause for dev. That sucks for me because it is harder to get the dev team to focus on it if they don't get the help they need to set it up.

Incentivized

Very simplified compared to other options. Needs to be able to tie in more conversion data.

Incentivized

Google Data Studio provides a great feature set considering its price point, especially when compared to commercial options from Microsoft and Tableau. While it may not be as versatile when it comes to working with and developing complex datasets, there is enough charm in its simple, easy-to-use UI to allow not-so-complex analytics to be conducted without having to hire a data analyst.

Incentivized

• DashThis has reduced the time I spend on reporting by about 50%
• Visualizations are simple and easy to understand -- Clients like them very much
• Reduced dependency on files as archive of all dashboards/reports are available online

Incentivized

• Free, so the only investment is time
• Because it doesn't have native support of non-Google sources, it can cost more money than Tableau
• The time spent formatting the templates or building connectors can have a negative impact on ROI
• As a agency, charging for the reporting service is profitable after the first month or two after building the dashboard.

Incentivized