Looker Studio vs. SeekWell, from ThoughtSpot

Fantastic for detailed data, especially for tracking user journeys from social media onto the website, for example. Great for use across multiple people in teams, even where only one or two people have a full understanding of the tool, as it is user-friendly once set up. Not hugely appropriate for presenting in and of itself, best as a source of raw data versus a tool to convey findings.

Incentivized

• Looker Studio helps us track error metrics in one place, making us more efficient as a team because we don’t have to switch between systems to gather data and then create a separate report.
• Since our SQL data is pretty messy, it helps us with clean data reporting by visualising spikes in errors.
• It also improves our communication with management, who are non-technical, by providing an easy-to-understand dashboard report.

Incentivized

• There are several limitations to data manipulation - especially with different scopes.
• Limited functionality on pivoting data, etc - ie, cannot create segments.
• Data has to be refreshed if new dataLayer elements are added often manually.
• A limited number of charts, graphics, etc.
• Limited design abilities (cannot bring in custom fonts, etc).

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

Looker Studio is easy to use, and it offers a sufficient variety of predefined visualizations to choose from. It's easy for us, and anyone can set up basic reporting without extensive data visualization skills. The interface layout is easy to understand, and it doesn't take long to get used to.

Incentivized

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

• 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