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 I usually recommend Microsoft 365 to my clients to keep them away from the Exchange server (sorry!) Our business has a lot of issues with exchange email functions and copy machines. I always recommend they download the desktop version and use the online version as needed. You never know when you will be without an internet connection, but you can usually trust your laptop will have a decent charge, and you can still be productive! Let it sync when the powers are back on - or your connection is alive.
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 keeps me extremely organized. It is so easy to link calendars, emails, and documents. keeps me well connected. It is so easy to send a quick message on teams or send an email to a group (for example, my particular team within the company). easy to use. Everything is straightforward, making it easy to find an answer to a question. There is even a search option to figure out how to do something within Microsoft. 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 Microsoft 365 really needs to work on protection part. In complex environment it is not reliable as compared to its competitors like Proofpoint. There are many instances where it fails to perform effectively. In SharePoint Online the versioning feature of the document needs to be improved by Microsoft. Sometimes when we have to roll back to the previous version it does not work as expected. In Teams messaging and app permission policies can be improved. There are some settings where we have to add a lot of things manually. 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 There are many features of Office that we cannot replicate in any other tool. Plus people know it already. It's not going away anytime soon.
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 While Microsoft 365 is an amazing toolset, its still a Microsoft product. Sadly, I think the quality control regarding updates has dropped a lot the last few years. Also, I think things like the new Outlook are no improvement. In my opinion, so many features are missing. Still they proceed to push this. Microsoft knows their suite is one of the only of its kind broadly used and because of that, in my opinion, they can pull whatever they want on the users and do that without issue.
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 Over the past 8 years of using Microsoft 365, I have noticed that they change vendors often. This always leads to a poor experience in the beginning, then levels out after some time for the company to get things worked out. As a customer, it is really frustrating because I don't have time when something isn't working to have them "look into my issue" and get back with me. They have even closed a ticket I specifically told them to keep open. Your applications are only as good as the support.
Read full review Implementation Rating Everything works and I use it all the time.
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 Its very user-friendly, collaborative and efficient that boosts productivity using cloud tools. their security is strong and it provides data protection. There are regular updates that shields us from attackers too. It offers a wealth of learning resources, including tutorials, help articles and video guide to help users make the most of the application and personally upgrade their skills.
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 Positively, it has increased productivity and efficiency in creating templates and being able to systemize some of the protocols we are working on putting into place. It has been a positive as well as most individuals and companies that we associate with also use MicroSoft 365 and therefore there is no need to have formats change in our documents when they open them up using another type of program. Getting work done quickly.... One and Done!!! Read full review ScreenShots