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Looker Studio

Looker Studio
Formerly Google Data Studio

Overview

What is Looker Studio?

Looker Studio is a data visualization platform that transforms data into meaningful presentations and dashboards with customized reporting tools.

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Recent Reviews

Best Analytical tool

8 out of 10
March 29, 2023
Incentivized
As data analysts, we have to create the report and dashboard in GDS. So, we have integrated some data sources like Google Analytics, …
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Awards

Products that are considered exceptional by their customers based on a variety of criteria win TrustRadius awards. Learn more about the types of TrustRadius awards to make the best purchase decision. More about TrustRadius Awards

Popular Features

View all 15 features
  • Pre-built visualization formats (heatmaps, scatter plots etc.) (49)
    9.2
    92%
  • Customizable dashboards (50)
    9.1
    91%
  • Report sharing and collaboration (50)
    6.7
    67%
  • Report Formatting Templates (49)
    5.4
    54%

Reviewer Pros & Cons

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Pricing

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N/A
Unavailable

What is Looker Studio?

Looker Studio is a data visualization platform that transforms data into meaningful presentations and dashboards with customized reporting tools.

Entry-level set up fee?

  • No setup fee

Offerings

  • Free Trial
  • Free/Freemium Version
  • Premium Consulting/Integration Services

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Features

BI Standard Reporting

Standard reporting means pre-built or canned reports available to users without having to create them.

7.6
Avg 8.4

Ad-hoc Reporting

Ad-Hoc Reports are reports built by the user to meet highly specific requirements.

6.4
Avg 8.0

Report Output and Scheduling

Ability to schedule and manager report output.

7.6
Avg 8.4

Data Discovery and Visualization

Data Discovery and Visualization is the analysis of multiple data sources in a search for patterns and outliers and the ability to represent the data visually.

8.8
Avg 8.2
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Product Details

What is Looker Studio?

Looker Studio, formerly Google Data Studio, is a data visualization platform from Google that transforms data into meaningful presentations and dashboards with customized reporting tools.

Looker Studio vs. Looker


Looker Studio is a part of Google's Looker Suite for business intelligence. Looker Studio is a self-serve BI solution where less technical users can create charts and reports, while Looker is a complete, enterprise BI platform, where technical users can build complex models that consider every aspect of the business. Looker Studio offers both free and pro versions, while Looker is not available for free.

Looker Studio Technical Details

Operating SystemsUnspecified
Mobile ApplicationNo

Frequently Asked Questions

Looker Studio is a data visualization platform that transforms data into meaningful presentations and dashboards with customized reporting tools.

Reviewers rate Location Analytics / Geographic Visualization highest, with a score of 9.3.

The most common users of Looker Studio are from Small Businesses (1-50 employees).
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Comparisons

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Reviews and Ratings

(268)

Attribute Ratings

Reviews

(1-25 of 51)
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Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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.
March 29, 2023

Best Analytical tool

Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
I have to create ad expenses dashboard to get an idea of the spending and conversion rate. So, GDS has the template which was so smooth just need to connect my G Ads account, and boom all report is there.
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Google Data Studio is great for creating simple graphs out of larger datasets that are continuously being updated. It's not the best when you want to build highly specific graphs and manipulate the data exactly the way you want to. Although there are formula functions to help with this, it can be difficult and time-consuming for beginners. Excel is a simpler route in that case.
Artyom Ashigov | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
When you want to create something really fast and meaningful Google Data Studio is one of the best choices you have. You can use different charts that will express your ideas in the best way. If you have a lot of time to prepare a project for management and if you have Power BI or Tableau, it is better to use one of these applications because they will offer you much more flexibility.
Mukul Saxena | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Editing the reports is little bit tricky or time consuming , as we have have to switch between Edit and View mode to see the effect of doing changes. So basically , it's not user friendly at making reports. Whereas on the other hand when it comes to integration , i think its really good as it provides more than 300 connectors, I haven't used all of them but it's a good option.
German Delgado | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Suited for situations that you have a lot of data bases, and a regular chart is not enough, also when you need to share reports and information with your team in a more efficient way. The possibility that each person can apply they’re on filters makes it more relevant to them, and this is a big deal, making the info relevant to user conducts to better understanding and better understanding leads to better decision.
November 04, 2021

Marketing Agency Employee

Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Google Data Studio for a lot of reports here at our marketing agency. It is easy to use and cloud-based. We use the google suite so the integration is helpful - google analytics, sheets, etc. Google Data Studio is also free which is a big plus as we are an agency that pays for multiple platforms.
Rafael Grandizoli | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
For a daily basis use, Google Data Studio can provide almost everything you need to generate a simple data visualization that can be easily updated (with an automated integration or manually). It can help create a basic BI analytics dashboard, but not complex ones since it would need more development skills.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Google Data Studio is great for simple, on-demand analytics and visualizations. The user interface is intuitive enough so that you don't need to be a data scientist in order to get some useful info from your data sets. If you are comfortable with having to manually export and load a CSV file every time you run it in order to get fresh data, then it will work for you - even better if you already use Google's platforms or one of the other supported connectors such as MySQL. However, the cloud-only option means that data compliance requirements will need to be taken into consideration.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Pros:
-Cost
-Easy to use
-Self-service
-Flexible visualizations out of the box
-Data sources, plug & play
-Easy to share (internal and externally)
-Easy to export and import data
-Easy to clone, edit, manage dashboards

Cons:
-Can be slow / not reliable
-Date ranges and sorting defaults can sometimes get messy
-Data joins/mergers can be challenging
-Limited to joining 5 different data sources
-Some quirky limitations on UI, labels
-Getting help / support can be a challenge from Google, generally on your own


Tegan Jenner | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
It's well suited if you have a report that you want to automatically refresh with new data. I.e. if you have a monthly report, in the same format from month to month, you can keep appending new data to your source data file, and refresh the report with minimal effort. This also allows you to collect historical data too, so you can always reference previous time periods, or change the date range of your report to answer any historical performance question that comes up.
April 29, 2021

Easy and Free to use

Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Google Data Studio is really great for anyone who needs help understanding and communicating the information on Google Analytics concisely. If you are a small business that needs to do weekly reporting on website performance or website sales, Google Data Studio makes this super easy to do with your teammates.
Christopher Penn | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Google Data Studio is a visualization tool. It's mandatory for anyone using the Google Marketing Platform, especially Google Analytics 4. It's essential for low-cost, lightweight visualization applications where live data and reporting is needed.

Google Data Studio is not a BI tool. It doesn't pretend to be one either, but that means you need to carefully think through what kinds of data you're going to be visualizing, and doing that pre-processing BEFORE your data gets to Google Data Studio.
Scott Walker | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
[Google] Data Studio is a great tool for someone who is starting out with Dataviz software or doesn't have the budget to purchase Tableau or something more powerful. I personally like using it because the bulk of my data sources are Google related (adwords, analytics, search console, etc.). So the native support is very convenient.

If you have to pull a lot of CRM data or outside connectors, you'll need to build the API yourself or purchase a connector from a third party. If doing so, you may want to seriously look at the all-in costs of the software stack; you may find that other (more supported) dataviz programs will be worth the cost. This is especially true if your pulling from 5 or more sources or if you need to query large amounts of data. But, if you're a SMB or a small agency creating a value-added report for your clients, then Data Studio is definitely a great place to start!
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Google Data Studio is best suited for bringing large amounts of data together and creating reports and visualizations in order to gain insights into what the data has to offer. It is easy to share dashboards and reports with other people so that they can access the insights without granting them access to the data.
April 27, 2021

Disappointing

Score 2 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
I would not usually recommend Google Data Studio. There are a lot more user friendly options out there. But if they just want to create a quick dashboard type view for a few data points, Google Data Studio wouldn't be a bad option.
Janaye Steadman | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
For our purposes (sending and receiving consistent reports) it is perfect. We use it specifically for social media, and the only drawback is that I can't always pull all the data I want (for example, I wanted to know how many applications we had on Facebook, but this is not a metric provided by Facebook, therefore I couldn't put it in a Google Data Studio report either).
Jordan Comstock | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
It is the best free tool for data visualizations. Especially if you stick to native google apps connecting to it. I've built some pretty looking data viz and it has helped us to automate marketing reporting.

It has been a hassle with external data sources. I know it has those capabilities, but setting it up hasn't been easy.
Omar Gutierrez | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
I always share my experience with Data Studio with my colleagues as a useful tool to generate quick, useful, data-driven reports for their businesses and clients. I think that the platform is easy to use, either by using one of the basic templates or by creating a tailored report with the most important and relevant information for their businesses. Once you've created the report, the information is just a click away, which is a very useful way to keep track of the performance of any website.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Well Suited:
If you are an beginner in reporting and looking for a less cost or free tool, this is the tool you should go for.
If you are a person with non technical background, but still want to create a BI report.
If your data is less (or not very huge) and create a report instantly.
If you are an avid Google user.

Less Appropriate:
If you are an avid user of Power BI and Tableau and want to report with the same functionality on Google Data Studio.
If your database has millions of records, this tool is for small to medium datasets.




Natalie C. Winslow | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
It's great for most of what we need to run reports on, but buying connectors could probably get expensive. If you need to connect more than five data sources, it might be cheaper to use another third-party Analytics reporting tool. However, in most cases, we find that it allows us to show data in various types of graphs and charts, and add our own color palette, logo, etc.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
I actually recommended Google Data Studio to other departments in our company. I think it's a great tool to easily create visuals out of data from Google analytics. No major technical skills are needed.

I wouldn't say less appropriate, but maybe a bit harder to integrate with the ads platforms, we need to go through a third party.
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