Likelihood to Recommend Looker Studio is well-suited for those wanting to analyze web/site data and performance quickly. It is simple enough to learn/use for quick report-building or drilling into data. Looker Studio is easier to use/understand than the GA4 console and thus has a better UI/UX. It is an efficient tool for fast, simple data needs—especially for team members with limited analytical capabilities and knowledge.
Read full review Metabase is an easy tool to use if you are interested in collecting and aggregating data from multiple platforms. It is also easy to set up and start receiving the data results as a report. It is also easy to integrate with other tools that generate visual reports and take the necessary actions based on the data details.
Read full review Pros 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 Read full review We're currently using it to fetch reports for our products, such as daily sales, pipeline, visits, and attendance reports. Data representation from database directly. Read full review Cons 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. Read full review Report Types Updates Colour/Branding Read full review Likelihood to Renew 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
Read full review Usability 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
Read full review Its generally quite easy to use but some SQL is definitely important
Read full review Support Rating 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.
Read full review Alternatives Considered The free version of
Looker Studio is still better than the leading enterprise-embedded BI tools, despite its weaknesses. The leading embedded BI platforms have terrible visualizations that can be spotted a mile away. They are also primarily locked to a grid, making it very hard to fully customize. The price point is also a major deterrent, since users end up paying for lots of features they might never use.
Looker Studio has weaknesses on the blending and modeling side, but we've been able to get by via connection to GBQ and transformation done in dbt.
Read full review It does not stack up against Metabase, they complete each other.
Read full review Return on Investment 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. Read full review It is serving us whatever we're looking for, and we've recommended many organizations to implement it if they want better data analytics as it provides better functionality than we will build. As a negative it gets difficult to get control over data to be fetch initially. Read full review ScreenShots