Looker Studio

Formerly Google Data Studio

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.

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.

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.

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.

Google Data Studio is free so almost any company can use it and benefit from it.

If your architecture is based on Google services, [Google Data Studio] is the best tool to use. Also if you are not dealing with complex data analysis.

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.

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.

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.

[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!

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Google Data Studio is a great tool to manage data, build dashboards for C and management level.

Displaying direct data from any analytics tools is excellent, complex analysis or calculations is difficult directly in Google Data Studio.

Google Data Studio is a fantastic investment. I honestly recommend investing in all of the free Google marketing tools. They offer great connectivity to each other and other platforms. They compile a large variety of outside data along with internal data from a company website or marketing assets they have deployed on the internet.

One year into use, Google Data Studio seems to be really well suited for organizations already in the G Suite ecosystem. It has a very similar feel/use to other Google tools like Drive and Sheets. Access control is also easy if the organization is already on Google. It is also affordable since it is free. That makes it within reach of small organizations who cannot afford products like Tableau.

Google Data Studio is a great tool if you're on a budget. For a free tool, it's amazing. It has some great features, the kinds of things you might find in a very expensive product, and it's completely free. We've used Google Data studio to visualize a lot of our marketing data. If you want basic reports, you don't need to pay for a product.

Google Data Studio (GDS) is best used when the need of the hour is a single live document with data over time. The usage of date filters and other filters is very useful. The place where it doesn't excel is that it's still in beta phase and sometimes reports break for no reason.

No more manually checking different info about your store from a number of sources. Everything is combined in one place.

It is well suited if Google supports the data connections you need or if you can push data into Google Sheets and leverage the information directly from there. It is less suited for a company with a desire for many data connections to pull in and/or a company that doesn't leverage the G Suite in general.

Google Data Studio is well suited for those that aren't ready or willing to make the leap to an enterprise solution, as such solutions tend to demand a larger price commitment, usually require a year-long contract, and also require someone with some background with BI tools.