Looker Studio is a data visualization platform that transforms data into meaningful presentations and dashboards with customized reporting tools.
$9
per month per user per project
Mode
Score 8.1 out of 10
N/A
Mode, or Mode Analytics, from ThoughtSpot since the June 2023 acquisition, is a business intelligence platform that unifies company analytics by bringing data teams and business teams together, so analysts can provide rapid answers to strategic, ad hoc questions. And, business stakeholder can access relevant data to answer their own questions which can often detract more impactful work.
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.
Mode is a clear category winner for how it easy it is to go from interactive analysis to professional quality reporting. You can easily do all your SQL and quite a bit of R/Python. If you want to quickly go from your database to simple charts, this is your pick. If you need to do heavier data modeling, scheduling jobs, or ML, you'll need something else, like Databricks. In my opinion, the quality of visualizations and some developer/analyst features make Databricks an unacceptable substitute.
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
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.
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.