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Google Data Studio
Interactive dashboard reporting and data visualization tool
Last updated: September 2024
Value for money rating
4.7
/5
325
Price starts from
Free
What users say
Price starts from
10.60
/user
Per month
Pricing model
Free trial
Price starts from
8
Pricing model
Free trial
Price starts from
18
/user
Per month
Pricing model
Free trial
Price starts from
30000
Pricing model
Free trial
Price starts from
25
Per month
Pricing model
Free trial
Neels V.
Information Technology and Services, 1-10 employees
Used daily for 2+ years
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Before DataStudio I had to prepare dashboards and reports in spreadsheets and documents and compile the raw data into reports in a manual way. I saved a tremendous amount of time by setting up the data flows and report/dashboard structures once in DataStudio and then just scheduling regular reports to go out automatically
The most impactful features of DataStudio are the wide range of visualizations you have access to in order to present your data in the most engaging and insightful way. Coupled with the wide range of data connectors that are available natively and also third-party connectors, which expands the scope widely. Once you have understood the overall way of working, the tool is very easy to use. There are lots of training videos available and lots of support available over the internet, in case you get stuck. Integration into my business practises was easy because of the flexibility in data input sources. If a specific connector does not exist, then you can always fall back on file imports.
The most important missing feature for me personally is a native (free) data connector to Facebook Ads. One has free access to all the Google platforms and I have a constant struggle to get a decent data connector to Facebook ad platform data. One improvement that I suggest is to add the functionality to do processing on calculated fields to do for instance 7-day moving average calculations on the platform itself. Now I have to do those calculations on a Google Sheet first and then import the results into the DataStudo reports. Or even make that a built-in function?
Hany I.
Higher Education, 11-50 employees
Used weekly for 2+ years
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Google Looker Studio ( formerly Google Data Studio ) allows my team members to access and create analytical reports and share them with stakeholders and teammates. It helps my team visualize performance reports and run simple ad-hoc analyses. The service enhances our productivity and improves the information workflow internally over the company and externally with our clients.
Google Looker Studio ( formerly Google Data Studio ) is easy to use and has an intuitive user interface that allows the average user to create and consume reports and dashboards. It integrates seamlessly with google analytics and workspace applications like Sheets, docs, and Google Drive. It facilitates self-service data analysis and business intelligence practices.
Google Looker Studio ( formerly Google Data Studio ) has a relatively slow performance and limited features regarding data connectors and visualization. Although the paid version has advanced features, it comes at a high cost with more difficulties and barriers to scale.
Mike K.
Marketing and Advertising, 1-10 employees
Used weekly for 2+ years
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Overall, my experience with Google Data Studio has been phenomenal. I'm able to easily manage and visualize all my data in one place. It's incredibly user friendly, and I'm able to customize my dashboards for different projects. The reporting capabilities are really helpful and allow me to quickly access insights that would take much longer with manual methods. Plus, the integration with other Google products makes it simple to create a comprehensive view of everything. Highly recommended!
I really like Google Data Studio as a long time user. It's really easy to use and it has an intuitive interface. I love that it integrates with other data sources like BigQuery, Google Ads, and Google Analytics so I can easily visualize my data in one place. The drag and drop feature makes it simple for me to customize my reports and dashboards however I want. Plus, the ability to collaborate with others on the same report is incredibly helpful.
I found the interface to be confusing and not very intuitive. It was difficult to figure out how to use the platform without taking some time to watch the tutorials. I also found it difficult to customize visualizations and create reports that were easy to understand. Overall, I found using Google Data Studio challenging, and would have preferred a more user-friendly experience.But for the price "FREE" and plenty of video's and ready to use templates this tool still wins for me.
Brent R.
Media Production, self-employed
Used weekly for 2+ years
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Data Studio has really improved over the last year or two. It's much more stable than it used to be, and is more in depth. As a small agency, I haven't found much that is missing. Outside of setting up integrations and data sources and then creating the dashboard connections, the rest is fairly simple to set up. Customizing a dashboard is easy, and sorting data is easy once you do a couple and learn the dimensions of how data is displayed. Having a free dashboard and reporting tool that integrates directly with other Google products is awesome.
I love that it's a tool directly from the same company where I get most of my data already. I use Google Analytics and Google Ads heavily in my business, so it's awesome to have a data analysis and reporting tool that has stable connections to both of these. Being able to integrate both, and other integrations into the same dashboard is a big plus. And the depth of features has really gotten pretty large over the last couple of years. Unless you need extremely advanced calculations and reporting, Data Studio will probably suit your needs. The ability to sort your data and fine-tune exactly how metrics are displayed is cool. It doesn't hurt that Data Studio is free! These kinds of tools are often very expensive, but Data Studio allows smaller studios like mine to get in the game for little to no investment.
It's a bit of a pain to get set up, and to fully integrate. The documentation, while large, is not easy to follow in my opinion. Adding a data source and then creating a dashboard using a specific source can be a little hit and miss. It shouldn't take 3 or 4 screens of options to tell my dashboard that I want to get data from a specific source. Once you get past it, it's fine. But setting up a new dashboard, and organizing dashboards, is cumbersome.
Verified reviewer
Consumer Goods, 51-200 employees
Used monthly for 2+ years
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Overall I am satisfied with the tool and I have used it several times in the past to create simple and effective dashboards.
I think that Google Data Studio is severely underused as a free tool for Google Workspace subscribers. Anytime I hear about someone paying for the expensive Tableau access I tell them to check out this program instead. Very comparable tool at little to no price.
Some features are difficult to understand how to use, but resources (free online classes) are available to teach yourself how to solve the issue. I just wish they would put more time into thinking of how to make the feature intuitive in the first place so that courses are not needed.
Verified reviewer
E-Learning, 201-500 employees
Used daily for 2+ years
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I had a big concern that I would no be able to use Microsoft Power BI (budget issue), but in the end of the road Google Data Studion was a good surprise. Good price, everything you need to put a high quality data project running. No issues. In another company for example, it would be my choice.
Once it's build your data sources, it's easy to build your dashboards even they don't have the best data viz options. It's in the Google tech stack, that makes easy to your team keep running. Would like to have Microsoft Power BI? It was my concerto too! But yes, Google Data Studio will deliver all info you need in a beautiful interface - don't worry. Good price, clear and light interface, access from any device. Your data project will meet the needs.
Different from Microsoft Power BI for example, you don't have a on screen calculation, easy to work on. Many times you need to create new fields, build cases with calculations to have the field to use on. You need an administrator/builder with more tech skills. But any doubt that I found, I had case or example in the web to search and use. But once it's build the base, it's easy to build dashboards, deploy, upgrade and so one.
Verified reviewer
Logistics and Supply Chain, 201-500 employees
Used daily for 2+ years
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Overall, despite its challenging user experience, it's still a great tool. The quality of the reports and charts are topnotch. For a free BI tool, it's a good value for our money
I like that it's basically free and it's easy to create good-looking reports and share them with your colleagues. We're able to basically have another BI tool at our disposal without going through a lengthy procurement and deployment process.
Connecting a database is quite challenging with Google Data Studio. The error messages are not very helpful at its current state. And sometimes it gives you random errors for no clear reason.
Guido N.
Marketing and Advertising, 11-50 employees
Used daily for 2+ years
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We use it to create ecommerce monitoring dashboards for all the clients of my agency. Dashboards are shared with the clients' teams, who can access them wherever they are.
It is free. It connects natively with all Google products (Google Analytics, Google BigQuery, Optimize, Google Ads, Google Sheets). It has connectors for most data sources (some are for free, others come at a reasonable price). It lets you develop and draw your own data visualization simply using Javascript. Being a Google free product, you can find a lot of documentation, both proprietary and from end users.
It is slow (especially when sourcing data from Google Analytics: then you add the slowness of data studio to the slowness of Analytics, Merchant Center, ...). You can create nifty dashboards, but it is not as flexible as other commercial tools (Tableau has many more features and data viz templates, and an analytical & data preparation engine that have nothing to do with the simple architecture of Data Studio)
Thomas C.
Computer Software, 1-10 employees
Used weekly for 1-2 years
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Absolutely amazing. It's like I have landed on Mars! I have discovered so many cool features and things I could offer my client "at a cost", for "no cost on me".
This software can link up with your Google Analytics account and retrieve data from there. So instead of using the slopping reporting function inside Google Analytics, you can make use of the power offered by Google Data Studio. It can make simple, but sophisticated table-based data using columns (or calculated columns), to present your data in many ways. OR, you can choose to use one of the many types of graphics / charts offered in this software. Last but not least, there are tons of community and native reporting templates, you can simply just download and start using. I used to pay Megalytics for really crappy and limited reports. By migrating my deployments over to Google Data Studio, things are free, and does more than ever before. Delivering website / web application reports to my clients is no longer a luxurious thing.
User identifyiable information cannot be reported when linking up with Google Analytics. This includes things like email address.
Joseph M.
Computer Software, 501-1,000 employees
Used daily for 2+ years
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Using Google Data Studio has been a very great experience for me. It is a strong tool that has helped me produce interactive reports with great visuals using data from many sources. I value how flexible and user-friendly it is, enabling me to tailor the reports to meet my particular requirements. Additionally, it is quite beneficial to be able to work together on the same report. Overall, Google Data Studio has met all of my expectations, and I heartily endorse it to anyone searching for a user-friendly data visualization tool.
Google Data Studio is a great tool for producing aesthetically beautiful and useful reports, in my opinion. I particularly loved how simple and user-friendly the interface was. To successfully share my thoughts, I was able to quickly connect to a wide range of data sources and design my own dashboards and visualizations. It was also ideal for team work because it allowed for real-time collaboration, which I enjoyed. Overall, Google Data Studio exceeded my expectations and has grown into a crucial component of my toolkit for data research.
Thus far, my experience with Google Data Studio has been very positive and I have not encountered any issues or concerns
Verified reviewer
Marketing and Advertising, 51-200 employees
Used daily for 2+ years
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Seeing many data sources in a single view with multiple date ranges and comparisons.
I would recommend every business used this, from small to large. The ability to combine and view google analytics, google ads and search console data is fantastic and gives you great insights into your business performance. There are also lots of templates available online to get you started for no cost.
The customisation has to come from someone with a fair bit of knowledge of the product when sharing with others. In the majority of times people will have to only have a view of the report and they won't really be able to amend or see other data within it. It is also a little slow when doing lots of data and changing the views.
Michelle M.
Music, 1-10 employees
Used weekly for 2+ years
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I had to find a cheap way to provide reporting for a client that would pull in data from a lot of different sources but the client didn't want to pay for a subscription to any of the commercially available options. I found Data Studio by mistake about three or four years ago and I haven't used any other "reporting" tool since discovering it.
What I like most about Google Data Studio is that it's free. Honestly, that's the main reason I use it, because I consult as a part-time gig with one-off projects and I simply cannot afford to buy into anyone else's "business analytics," "business intelligence," or "reporting" software tools. The fact that it works, is customizable, and is fairly easy to figure out if you've ever worked with web-based, data-driven visualizations are just icing on the cake.
Getting started with it can be a challenge, especially if you've never worked with "connectors" for database-driven projects before. The initial walk-through provided by Google is just enough to get you completely lost. I think more companies would use this tool if they provided a better introduction to how to properly set up your projects.
Andrea S.
Marketing and Advertising, 11-50 employees
Used daily for 2+ years
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Overall, Data Studio is great: doesn't require extensive technical knowledge, is free, versatile and offers the ability to create real-time dashboard using different data sources - including blended ones - very easily. As an ad agency, it's one of our most used tools.
There's a reason why most agencies and marketers use Google Data Studio to create dashboards using advertising data: it's fairly powerful, integrates natively with Google's ad stack, offers decent integrations to other ad networks when using a connector (we use Supermetrics), and it's very easy to use. For a free tool, the value just can't be beat.
Data Studio is not the best overall product in the space, because it lacks the capabilities of more advanced business intelligence tools, it's fairly slow at pulling data from non-Google sources and it's got bugs - such as tables and charts breaking randomly, and then working again after a refresh, but overall is a fairly good tool. Some customization options are also suprisingly limited: for example, there is a strangely limited amount of fonts which can be used in the dashboards.
Julie K.
Banking, 11-50 employees
Used daily for 6-12 months
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it is actually very useful for me to create interactive dashboards and also reports. figures and data can illustrate clearly. I can collaborate with my co-workers and work on same dashboard, which help us to complete our tasks effectively. But in some case customization is somewhat limited. Also do not get immediate solution from the support system.
A simple and intuitive interface so easy to use .Integrate with all other Google products, which helps a lot.The customization feature in some case is mind-blowing.A team can work simultaneously on the same dashboard, so I can collaborate with my co-workers in same workFree of cost so it reduce my business expense.Can create real-time dashboards, so understand website traffic etcAccessed through smartphones alsoAutomatically refresh data, so always display the most up-to-date information.
Limited support for non-Google data sourcesCustomization options for visualizations and formatting are significantly lessThe support system is very poor and do not get solution for doubts and problemsData security and privacy is a concern, mainly about business data.Required more advanced features and functions to make report impressive
Matthew B.
Computer Software, 10,001+ employees
Used daily for 1-2 years
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To summarize, this was the most cost-effective solution for me because I needed just Google platforms for which to generate reports, and I wanted to save money on a reporting program. If you want additional social or video reporting for a combined reporting platform, it may be more cost effective to purchase a separate reporting product than to pay for Google Data Studio to incorporate that data.
Google Data Studio's greatest asset is the fact that it is completely free to use. It's a no-brainer to use Google Data Studio if you only need to aggregate and visualize data from numerous Google products and platforms (such as Google Ads, Analytics, Search Console, etc.). You don't have to pay per connection or result for any of these products because they can all connect to Google Data Studio for free.
As a result of Data Studio's extensive reporting capabilities, the program itself can be difficult for new users to grasp, and the learning curve for reporting is rather high. With the new program, we had to spend a lot of time learning it before we could start using it, which meant that we had one person of our team responsible for reporting.
Kevin M.
Marketing and Advertising, 11-50 employees
Used weekly for 2+ years
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Overall this is useful data visualization tool that meets most organizational/departmental needs.
Price for entry level reporting is free. Hard to beat that. There is a growth path for data platform connectivity should your needs expand over time.
More sophisticated calculations (KPIs for example) can be challenging to execute.As a cloud-based tool, the interface can be slow during some time periods.Reporting can be slow to load.
Verified reviewer
Retail, self-employed
Used daily for 1-2 years
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Overall, it's fairly easy to manipulate dashboards and see specific data. When building dashboards from scratch, it can be a bit time consuming, especially when first getting started. I've found that finding templates and copying how data is pulled makes setting up new dashboards much faster.
Besides the FREE price point, it's fairly easy to get started using pre-made data templates. Templates are customizable or you can build your own dashboards to filter and see the exact information you'd like. It connects natively with all of Google's products (Analytics, BigQuery, Optimize, Ads, Sheets) making it easy to get data from multiple sources.
Dashboards can sometimes be slow to load since data is pulled in real-time. If you're new to DS, it can take some searching to get the data into the dashboard that you want. Once you understand where and how to find things, it's fairly simple to build off of that.
Verified reviewer
Health, Wellness and Fitness, 501-1,000 employees
Used daily for 6-12 months
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It has almost all the data and we can create dashboard using all that data, by just drag and drop, which makes it super easy and convenient. For static data like targets, we can connect to google sheets, which results in one stop solution for many employees to track their performance. We also get rich demographic info using GA, which can be visualized here on maps also. After giving access to business users, they are self creating dashboards which is offloading my work.
It does sampling with users when data points are less, which results in different value for every user when using direct GA connector, we have to use Big Query connector to overcome this problem but it incurs cost. Sometimes it does wrong aggregation like while calculating distinct users, sometimes it will give distinct in total for which sum of table will by greater than total, but sometimes it just adds up the values which is wrong.
John H.
Music, 11-50 employees
Used weekly for 1-2 years
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Google Data Studio is a fine lightweight product but I do not think it is a top-tier analytics tool. It is probably fine if you are working with small to medium size datasets and you are primarily concerned with data visualization.
Data Studio is a great choice if you are already on a Google stack. It is (or can be) virtually free and it offers plenty of flexibility for light analytics or old-fashioned data profiling. I have used it with some success for enterprise-grade analytics, but it is easy to run up against data limitations. It's generally very quick (especially with BI Engine) and it works well with other Google tools (such as GA).
The product feels a bit cheap compared to its competitors. I found it difficult to manage assets across multiple teams. We ran into multiple issues with ownership (granted, our own fault) that we wouldn't have encountered with, e.g., Power BI or Tableau.
Jakub N.
Marketing and Advertising, 501-1,000 employees
Used daily for 2+ years
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I love how dynamic is the development process of GDS, how many new features are added each month.
It's the easiest and the most affordable data visualization tool on the market. It's quite easy to learn, just enough to jump in and create your first dashboards in a short time. Despite that, it's used by professionals in many corporate companies to visualize data and create interactive dashboards - so why not use it?
There are things that are hard to accomplish in Data Studio, like specific types of charts; some of them are confusing, like data blending; and some of them are limited, like free connectors.
Daïnah B.
Professional Training & Coaching, 11-50 employees
Used daily for 2+ years
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We used Google DataStudio for the price (free), it was very easy to use and was mainly use for the simple dashboard and use cases.
Google Data Studio is very easy to use with BigQuery's connection : we can connect directly tables, views or custom query.
Before integration with looker, we were limited with left join between tables (no inner join and no right join)
Barış T.
E-Learning, 11-50 employees
Used daily for 6-12 months
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I make presentations by processing and visualizing the data I obtained through Google analytics.
An easy to use application. You can edit your KPIs and visualizations as you wish. Very effective and price performance product
There isn't any feature that I don't like. Users will see it when they start using it.
Lainey T.
Marketing and Advertising, 1-10 employees
Used weekly for 2+ years
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Very good to date, it's a very comprehensive product and free!
We can collate all our data sources into one automated report for our clients.
Third-party connectors can be quite expensive.
Jacob N.
Health, Wellness and Fitness, 11-50 employees
Used daily for 6-12 months
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I'm able to integration my advertising campaign results in an affordable system and build my own reporting.
I like the many possibilities of integrations with the data studio. It helps when you have multiple advertising campaigns to report on
It is a little difficult to create your own custom reporting charts.
Victor S.
Accounting, 10,001+ employees
Used daily for 1-2 years
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Overall, I would say I enjoyed it because it provided me lots of help in value in my company, and it was really easy to use.
I liked the data management and dashboard features the mos as the provided the most value and they were both easy to use even for beginners.
The lack of proper costumer support, and the data management being quite hard to setup are the things I hated the most about this software.