Looker Studio vs. Roambi (discontinued)

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.

Incentivized

Getting Roambi up to speed in your company certainly is a quick win. After just a few days, several of our reports were mobilized, interactive and automatically updated. Building Roambi reports is not hard to do; the intuitive interface allows virtually any type of user to create his or her own reports.

• 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

Incentivized

• Report templates that are easy to learn, use, update and maintain.
• Great looking reports that stay up-to-date with what Apple is producing. When Apple rolled out the new look and feel to their iOS7 release, Roambi created a brand new set of reports within two weeks to go along with the iOS7 changes.
• Seamless integration with our existing BI environment, SAP Business Objects XI, 3.1. This drastically reduced the time from purchase to client-ready roll out from months to weeks.

• 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.

• cardex type of presentation is already innovated in roambi in 2012, even iOS safari browser idea was created from this cardex style
• blink view is only available for sap and ms sql
• roambi publisher is very user-friendly and understandable for non technical person as well

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

I would definitely use Roambi again because of its ease-of-use, but its lack of customization ability makes it difficult to recommend to businesses as business needs are always changing. People are picky, and on the Roambi project, we were not able to fully live up to the customer's expectations, limited by Roambi's preset limitations.

It is not ideal and requires time and dedication to understand how to work with it. Also, it has a lot of limitations around data it can accept. But in most cases, this tool is sufficient for everyday tasks of product and marketing departments. I wouldn't say that the interface is very user-friendly, but for people who regularly work with analytical tools, it must be ok.

Incentivized

VERY easy to use. Only limited by how the graphs and data is initially set up.

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.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

We have compared Roambi against Business Objects, Reporting Services (on tablet) and Cubeware Cockpit. All those solutions lack in support of touch capabilities and responsiveness. Roambi "feels" just right. There is no training required and users love to explore the application. Compared to Roambi all other solutions feel very technical and hard to understand.

• 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.

Incentivized

• Increased insights on customer success metrics (using a Layers report).
• Higher motivation of employees, better communication towards employees, tighter bonds with the company - because of Roambi Flow. Periodic Flow magazines with analytic capabilities are sent out to the employees, as we value frequent and meaningful contact - both ways.