Likelihood to Recommend 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.
Read full review Very well-suited in growing organizations, at a company of the size I work at it is the perfect solution in terms of functionality and cost. Compared to other solutions like PowerBI etc, which can run into the hundreds of thousands just to implement, Metabase is fantastic. In terms of scalability, as we grow, there will be inevitable questions over how well we can grow with Metabase.
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 Store Data Make Querying easy Quickly ingest data from many sources 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 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.
Read full review I used
Looker in a previous role and found it clunky, difficult to navigate, hard to collaborate on, and ultimately massively expensive. I evaluated
Looker to see if it would be right to implement it as a solution in my current role, but Metabase was the clear winner - the ease of use, cost, functionality, and simple report exploration made it an easy decision.
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 We can make great reports for our customers quickly We can store customer data dynamically we can create customer specific metrics Read full review ScreenShots