Looker Studio vs. Tableau Public

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Looker Studio
Score 8.2 out of 10
N/A
Looker Studio is a data visualization platform that transforms data into meaningful presentations and dashboards with customized reporting tools.N/A
Tableau Public
Score 8.8 out of 10
N/A
Tableau Public is a free edition of the Desktop product. With this edition, data can only be published to the Tableau public website and does not allow work to be saved or exported locally.
$0
per month
Pricing
Looker StudioTableau Public
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Looker StudioTableau Public
Free Trial
NoNo
Free/Freemium Version
NoYes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Looker StudioTableau Public
Considered Both Products
Looker Studio
Chose Looker Studio
Google Data Studio is free, easily integrates with the Google Marketing Platform, and is simple to use. It's a better choice for most basic marketing reporting. Tableau is better for more BI and exploratory data analysis.
Tableau Public
Chose Tableau Public
Tableau Public is most similar to Google Data Studio in terms of being freely available for public use. However, its capabilities and sophisticated visualizations are far and beyond anything offered by Data Studio: Tableau is ideal for creating professional caliber workbooks …
Top Pros
Top Cons
Features
Looker StudioTableau Public
BI Standard Reporting
Comparison of BI Standard Reporting features of Product A and Product B
Looker Studio
7.6
51 Ratings
10% below category average
Tableau Public
9.8
12 Ratings
15% above category average
Pixel Perfect reports8.335 Ratings9.710 Ratings
Customizable dashboards9.150 Ratings10.012 Ratings
Report Formatting Templates5.449 Ratings9.712 Ratings
Ad-hoc Reporting
Comparison of Ad-hoc Reporting features of Product A and Product B
Looker Studio
6.4
50 Ratings
23% below category average
Tableau Public
9.7
12 Ratings
19% above category average
Drill-down analysis7.442 Ratings9.812 Ratings
Formatting capabilities8.246 Ratings9.712 Ratings
Integration with R or other statistical packages3.323 Ratings9.49 Ratings
Report sharing and collaboration6.750 Ratings9.811 Ratings
Report Output and Scheduling
Comparison of Report Output and Scheduling features of Product A and Product B
Looker Studio
7.6
50 Ratings
9% below category average
Tableau Public
9.5
11 Ratings
13% above category average
Publish to Web9.144 Ratings10.011 Ratings
Publish to PDF7.243 Ratings10.09 Ratings
Report Versioning8.131 Ratings9.89 Ratings
Report Delivery Scheduling5.034 Ratings9.59 Ratings
Delivery to Remote Servers8.718 Ratings8.17 Ratings
Data Discovery and Visualization
Comparison of Data Discovery and Visualization features of Product A and Product B
Looker Studio
8.8
49 Ratings
7% above category average
Tableau Public
9.7
11 Ratings
17% above category average
Pre-built visualization formats (heatmaps, scatter plots etc.)9.249 Ratings9.811 Ratings
Location Analytics / Geographic Visualization9.346 Ratings9.811 Ratings
Predictive Analytics7.924 Ratings9.79 Ratings
Best Alternatives
Looker StudioTableau Public
Small Businesses
IBM SPSS Modeler
IBM SPSS Modeler
Score 7.8 out of 10
IBM SPSS Modeler
IBM SPSS Modeler
Score 7.8 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
Mathematica
Mathematica
Score 8.3 out of 10
Mathematica
Mathematica
Score 8.3 out of 10
Enterprises
IBM SPSS Modeler
IBM SPSS Modeler
Score 7.8 out of 10
IBM SPSS Modeler
IBM SPSS Modeler
Score 7.8 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
Looker StudioTableau Public
Likelihood to Recommend
8.8
(51 ratings)
8.5
(14 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
9.0
(1 ratings)
9.1
(2 ratings)
Usability
9.0
(3 ratings)
10.0
(5 ratings)
Support Rating
6.7
(10 ratings)
9.5
(6 ratings)
Online Training
-
(0 ratings)
9.0
(1 ratings)
Implementation Rating
-
(0 ratings)
9.1
(2 ratings)
User Testimonials
Looker StudioTableau Public
Likelihood to Recommend
Google
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.
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Tableau
Tableau public is the best platform to build dashboards for your personal profile and share with recruiters. It's always good to keep ourselves updated on the latest features, create sample dashboards and save them to a personal profile. Tableau public is free and doesn't need any subscription. anyone can create an account and start building reports.
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Pros
Google
  • 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
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Tableau
  • Data visualization: lots of different options, including bar, scatter, pie, waterfall charts to explore relationships between variables, and to present findings/trends to different teams
  • Integrates readily with limited, though different data sources: TXT, CSV, TDE, Access
  • Exports reports for review of different dashboards: client-ready/team-ready, with a clean and tidy presentation in PDF format (or hardcopy)
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Cons
Google
  • 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.
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Tableau
  • Tableau Public (both Desktop and Server) like their "for a fee" counterparts offer very easy to learn and use tools to transform data into pictures and gain insights into your data. Most organizations report a reduction in development time of 10x vs. other similar tools, due to the intuitive user interface. That said, with Tableau Public, published workbooks are "disconnected" from the underlying data sources and require periodic updates when the data changes. Users are limited to 1 Gb of storage space per user ID and password as well.
  • I would like to see better options for public sharing of visualizations and data from within the "for a fee" products as more and more organizations are moving in the direction of data sharing with partners and their communities.
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Likelihood to Renew
Google
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
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Tableau
It's free, right? I'll keep using the free version. So the real question to ask is this? Will I pay $999 for the Personal version or $1,999 for the Professional? Yikes! That is a big stretch. I'm not sure about that. The product comparison chart is at: http://www.tableausoftware.com/public/comparison
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Usability
Google
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
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Tableau
Tableau public is a great training tool to understand the basics of Tableau before buying it. A great tool to extend Excel's visualization and to publish data for others. Not useful for anything you need secure. No ability to access databases. Static information only.
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Support Rating
Google
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.
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Tableau
I have not yet required to contact support as the documentation and help i found online has always worked so far
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Online Training
Google
No answers on this topic
Tableau
I found it sufficient, and fast. I could easily "kick the tires" with Tableau on my data so I got up and running fast.
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Implementation Rating
Google
No answers on this topic
Tableau
Start at the end and work backward. Identify the business case / issue and questions the end users have, then identify the data needed, and where to get it.
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Alternatives Considered
Google
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.
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Tableau
Google Charts/Drive is sufficient for simpler data sets, but it does not integrate with other web platforms and the visualization does not look as professional. I'm not aware of any other competitors that offer the same package as Microsoft.
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Return on Investment
Google
  • 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.
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Tableau
  • Tableau Public visualizations have helped drive traffic to our content and sites
  • The lack of cost means it's easy to demonstrate our experience to attract paying clients
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ScreenShots