Item: Looker Studio
Rating: 10
Author: Verified User

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We are using Looker Studio Pro for embedded Analytics. Looker Studio makes getting started with customized analytics really easy. It also has an incredible amount of features and tools to offer for advanced use cases. I started by connecting Google Sheets data, transitioned into connecting supermetrics, and 9 years later, I am still using Google Data Studio, now with big data from a Google Big Query warehouse. I love the fact that it utilizes an open canvas similar to PowerPoint or Slides. You can move charts, shapes, and images anywhere you want at the pixel level, and rearrange the order they display via send to back or front settings.

Pros and Cons

Open Canvas
Broad customizability
Expansive connectors
Drag and drop

Pro tier is still in the early stages. Support is lacking and unclear, even with the new paid plan with the SLA.
Needs better user management. IAM, SSO, etc for the embedded use case.
Needs more features to support embedding.

Return on Investment

Showcases Analytics to our customers

Alternatives Considered

Looker, Sisense, Tableau Cloud, Tableau Desktop and Cumul.io

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.

Key Insights

Do you think Looker Studio delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with Looker Studio's feature set?

Yes

Did Looker Studio live up to sales and marketing promises?

Did implementation of Looker Studio go as expected?

Would you buy Looker Studio again?

Yes

Other Software Used

Rewatch, YouTrack, Figma

Likelihood to Recommend

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.

Looker Studio Pro. Dawn of a new era?

Overall Satisfaction with Looker Studio