Looker Studio is a data visualization platform that transforms data into meaningful presentations and dashboards with customized reporting tools.
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Microsoft Power BI
Score 8.4 out of 10
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Microsoft Power BI is a visualization and data discovery tool from Microsoft. It allows users to convert data into visuals and graphics, visually explore and analyze data, collaborate on interactive dashboards and reports, and scale across their organization with built-in governance and security.
$10
per month per user
Pricing
Looker Studio
Microsoft Power BI
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Looker Studio
Microsoft Power BI
Free Trial
No
Yes
Free/Freemium Version
No
Yes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
No setup fee
Additional Details
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More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Looker Studio
Microsoft Power BI
Considered Both Products
Looker Studio
Verified User
Analyst
Chose Looker Studio
Easy availability and accessible with Google suits. Sharing is smooth.
We selected Google Data Studio because it is easier to make connections with third-party data sources. Also Google Data Studio can understand connections between different tables and databases better that its competitors such as Power BI. Compared to Power BI you do not need to …
Verified User
Engineer
Chose Looker Studio
Google holds it's own against these competitors as they each have their own strengths and weaknesses. While Tableau provides user-interactive reporting, its formatting options can be quickly rigid and frustrating.
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 …
Google Data Studio is much more intuitive to pick up and start using immediately. There was very little need for formal training or onboarding to start using the tool quickly. Power BI was much more difficult to start using.
The formatting in GDS is also very customizable, and …
Compared with Tableau and Power BI, I would say Google Data Studio is fairly placed or a pretty decent tool. We need to understand, this is a free tool and it will have its own limitations - apart from that this is a pretty decent tool compared to the biggies in the market.
Officially we are still on Tableau Desktop. We are nearing the end of our "exploration" phase with Google Data Studio. Tableau's products are expensive, especially for a small organization like us. There are many better uses of the software budget than Tableau. Google Data …
I selected Google Data Studio because it was free. In general it compares favorably against BIME but less against PowerBI and Tableau. I was looking for a free tool to help surface metrics company-wide and this tool was perfect for me. PowerBI and Tableau have much more data …
Google Data Studio provides basic functionalities for visualizing data and creating simple reports, but it certainly does not provide the advanced visualizations and features that Tableau and Power BI offer. Moreover, Tableau offers built-in advanced functions and data …
Google Data Studio is widely available and accessible, can be shared easily, and it only takes 20-30 min to build a rudimentary dashboard. It has very little setup and does not rely on internal data architecture and development. For later development purposes, Tableau, Power …
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.
In operations we use the tool for many different topics, from factory quality systems to high level reviews. We have created kind of an internal "App Store" based on Power BI where you have a lot of different dashboards for different solutions (cost, cash, health and safety, sales, factories, distribution centers...) and you as an user just need to get in that "App Store" and enter in whatever tool can be useful for you. It is open to all the operations employees and can use on demand. Also it has raised the imagination of our colleagues, as they are not only working by themselves creating new reports, but also raising fantastic ideas that can be extended for the usage of all the community.
The desktop app is great but needs a lot of performance improvements
No MacOS Version for the Desktop app, this is a big limitation for business since executives prefer Macs
Premium Cloud Version of Power BI is awfully expensive
On-Premise Version of the Power BI Reports Server is bundled only with SQL Server Enterprise License and cannot be purchased separately and requires Software Assurance Subscription
On-Premise Power BI Report Server doesn't support ADFS, AzureAD or any Claims-Based authentication platform, a sad disadvantage for enterprises
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
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
At this point, I think we all know who has taken the lead in the business intelligence and analytics market worldwide. With fresh new updates every other day on top of an already robustly built product with all features that one can dream of is a no brainer, I feel. Microsoft will invariably be synonymous with quality and professionalism.
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.
I can't really speak to the support overall, [but] I will say that in the almost three years I have used the system, I have only needed to contact their support team once. I think the team was helpful, but it did take some time for us to resolve the issues/ request that they had. I guess the good news is that the system is pretty stable, and I personally have rarely needed to contact their technical support team.
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.
[Microsoft] Power BI is practical and effective, like a hammer for a nail, it is easy to use and produces very quickly the results that in most cases are urgently required by clients (nice reports to share on the web). To start using [Microsoft] Power BI you need a business email address, with that you create an account in Power BI Service and in less than 1 hour you will have installed Power BI Desktop, a report will have been created and it will have been published on the web .