The digital era is based on massive amounts of raw data that must be translated into insights for organizations. To provide organizations with tools to handle enormous amounts of data effectively, Power BI and Google Looker Studio are recognized as the best two systems for business intelligence and data visualization globally. Both tools are different in terms of analytics data and many other features that fit into different user requirements.
This blog will compare Power BI and Google Looker Studio in-depth. It will explore their features, the advantages and disadvantages of each, and explore some useful applications to guide you on the most suitable one for your company.
Understanding the Fundamentals of Power BI
Microsoft’s Power BI is a detailed business analytics application that helps employees in the same organization share their insights and allow others to visualize data. Business users within the Microsoft ecosystem use Power BI for its dashboard, reporting capabilities, and ease of integration with other Microsoft products.
The dashboards and reports generated by Power BI are interactive and allow users to connect to various data sources. Some of the data sources that can be accessed include SQL Server, Hadoop, Azure SQL Database, Excel spreadsheets, Azure Blob Storage, and more. Power BI’s capabilities include planning, preparing, analyzing, and visualizing data to drive decisions and updates in any company’s management.
One of its key features is its wide data connectivity; for example, Power BI can import data from multiple data sources, such as cloud services, on-premises databases and Excel files, and bring them together in the Cloud to create visual reports that will enable real-time exploration and analysis by anyone who visits the site.
It has a particularly powerful aspect in taking the preparation of the data to visualise – which is one of the most challenging tasks when dealing with data – by using Power Query and manipulating the data before it is visualised. Users can now pose natural language questions that generate improved data exploration for intuitive visualization.
Moreover, Power BI incorporates strong security that protects sensitive data, featuring role-based access control and data encryption. The Power BI Service enables report sharing, thereby encouraging teamwork and allowing enterprises to take advantage of pooled insights.
What Does the Google Looker Studio Entail?
Google Looker Studio (previously called Google Data Studio) is a cloud-based data visualization tool that supports multiple data sources. Looker Studio allows users to transform their data into interactive reports, graphs, and dashboards.
Looker Studio is an easy-to-use tool that can be integrated with many other Google tools, such as Google Sheets, Google Analytics, or Google Ads, making it an ideal source of exploring apps. Users can easily transfer their data to these tools to view the data through Looker Studio’s user-friendly interface, which will not require managers to be programming professionals.
Another plus point of Google Looker Studio is that it can connect to many data sources, especially those in the Google ecosystem, with third-party data connectors also supported. This connectedness allows users to bring in data from various platforms and combine it into a single report. With tons of templates and themes available, Looker Studio is known for its customization capabilities, which allow customers to create reports customized to their needs.
Another useful component of Looker Studio is the real-time collaboration tool that allows multiple people to work on reports together simultaneously. Teams looking to enhance performance and streamline the reporting process would benefit from Looker Studio’s collaboration platform.
Secondly, the technology is entirely free, which makes it appealing to companies of all types, including startups and small enterprises, who may be operating on a budget.
Comparing the Strengths & Weaknesses of Power BI & Google Looker Studio
Power BI serves this role for businesses that require in-depth analysis and detailed reporting well due to its reporting and analytical strengths and its ability to communicate this information through extensive visualizations. Despite this, the subscription-based pricing model may prove prohibitive for some users, such as those running startups or smaller businesses, while also requiring users with experience in, and a willingness to use, DAX (Data Analysis Expressions) to utilize its more advanced features.
A key advantage offered by Google Looker Studio is that it is free to use, and as such, a company can take advantage of these features without paying a penny more. The fact that it is easier to use means that reports can be created and shared faster. Compared to Power BI, it doesn’t contain much analytical capability or sophisticated data transformation. Also, data preparation might be less effective for users when using it.
Comparing Both Tools in Terms of Utilization and Efficiency
If you are part of an organization that’s already invested in the Microsoft ecosystem, you’re going to want to take a closer look at Power BI because its analytics chops are strong. That makes it a good choice for companies needing predictive analytics and deep reporting. If you manage complex data and need sophisticated data transformation functions, you can use them in Power BI. And if your organization has sophisticated security requirements, Power BI has sophisticated security capabilities for guarding confidential data.
On the other hand, Google Looker Studio is a great tool for groups and companies favoring economy, simplicity, and collaborative work. The connectivity with the other Google products and external data sources and the ability to quickly generate in-depth reports make it a great choice for startups or small to medium-sized companies who need a simple reporting tool that doesn’t require complex analytics. Such an ability to develop reports and dashboards quickly, which is extremely helpful for team productivity, makes real-time collaboration the most applicable feature for businesses where multiple users can work on reports simultaneously.
In terms of Data Source Integration: Power BI Vs Google Looker Studio
By default, Looker Studio is also linked to many Google products, such as BigQuery, Cloud Storage, Google Sheets, Google Analytics, and Google Ads. Data from your Facebook Ads account can also be imported via our connector and JSON or API – or you can install one of more than 800 partner connectors (and build your own, too). You can even connect to NoSQL data sources. So you don’t have to have an SQL data source to use it, either!
Furthermore, its data blending tool enables you to merge data from several sources to create a single dashboard. The maximum number of sources you can use is four; however, each must share the same set of one or more dimensions (a join key).
Nevertheless, Power BI allows you to integrate over 100 data sources (including NoSQL and SQL). Additionally, you can integrate the databases (BigQuery, Amazon Redshift, MySQL, Azure, etc) and files (JSON, PDF, Excel, Google Analytics, etc), just as you can with Google’s tool.
You can format many data containers, but Microsoft offers two types of queries: ‘Append Queries’ and ‘Merge Queries’. The first one ‘fuses’ two existing queries into a new query akin to performing an ‘outer join’ operation in an SQL database, and the second one fuses two existing queries into a new query akin to performing a ‘left join’ operation in an SQL database. Both hold all rows from a first query and all from a second query (you ‘append’ them after the first).
In Terms of Data Modelling: Power BI Vs Google Looker Studio
Data modeling is analyzing and describing all the types of data your company produces and collects and how it interacts with those types. It’s important because it preps your data for analysis. Look at your datasets, identify what fields you need to add to show and analyze them, and discover new market insights you don’t have yet.
When you connect your data source to Looker Studio, a list of columns (Dimensions and Metrics) will appear. You can rename these fields to whatever highlights the data depending on the business goal you are trying to achieve. Each field has a name, type, and default aggregation from the data source. Next, you can create calculated fields, essentially formulas that change values in one or more fields from your data source. The results of your formulas will be shown in each data row of the charts to which you add the formula.
On the other hand, modeling with Power BI is carried out in two stages:
- Relationship Definition and Management
You can create relationships between your data sets to compute results and present the data you need in your reports.
- Calculated Fields Creation
With DAX formulas, you can generate calculated fields very similar to the ones available in Looker Studio.
Power BI users leverage Power Query to perform complex data manipulation tasks, such as connecting to many data sources, cleaning up and transforming the data, and consolidating it to a single data source before bringing the consolidated data to Power BI. This step is crucial to ensure consistency and the veracity of data and enables the dashboards and reports to be reliable.
The DAX language that Power BI uses to build calculated measures and columns in the data model is a very rich mathematical language that can accomplish detailed calculations and aggregations that ultimately leave the user with broader control over data analysis. While DAX offers a lot of leeway for people ready to learn its syntax, the learning curve could be steep for some people who want to get used to it.
Power BI makes the data model perform better so the reader can use the data on a large data set. The solution is relevant for enterprises working with large data, as it speeds up queries by performing them in memory and compressing the data.
In Terms of Data Analytics: Power BI Vs Google Looker Studio
Looker Studio does not feature predictive analytics, meaning you cannot generate time series forecasts or classification regression. Furthermore, it doesn’t have native support for R or Python. Still, Panoply will work with them, too (or you could use a Python-updated Google Sheet and link that to Looker Studio, but that’s good for smaller datasets, too; for larger datasets, you want BigQuery).
You don’t need to know HTML to embed it: Looker Studio handles all the heavy lifting, and it renders and delivers them automatically for you for any website or application that supports the HTML iframe element. Unlike Looker Studio, Power BI also includes much support for advanced and predictive analytics, including time series analysis, clustering methods, custom advanced analytics visuals, fast insights, etc.
It also offers support for various programming languages, such as DAX, M, R, Python, and so on, so you can mold your data into insights. And finally, it makes embedded analytics available for your company and your clients (without them having to log in to Power BI).
When coupled with streaming data sets or other live data sources like Azure SQL, users can build dashboards that update as new data arrives. This could be useful to any business tracking sales stats, customer behavior, or real-time performance metrics.
Looker Studio is a great tool for real-time marketing data analytics. Thanks to its extensive integration with Google’s services (Google Analytics, Google Ads, Google Search Console), they were useful for tracking web traffic and ad statistics in real-time. This data access is instantaneous and can significantly reduce reporting time, which would benefit any business reliant on digital marketing metrics.
General Features Comparison Table
The table provided below illustrates the most prominent features and uses of Google Looker Studio and Power BI, which will help you to explain the critical differences between these two:
| Feature | Google Looker Studio | Power BI |
| Pricing | No cost | Limited feature-free version that requires a subscription |
| Ease of Use | UI that is easy to use and learn | A modest learning curve, particularly for features that are sophisticated. |
| Data Connectivity | It primarily integrates Google services and a few other connectors. | Extensive support for a variety of data sources, like cloud services and SQL databases |
| Data Transformation | Fundamental elements of change | Power Query’s enhanced data manipulation capabilities |
| Visualization Options | Interactive graphics that may be customized | Large visualization library with adaptable settings |
| Collaboration | Instantaneous cooperation within a cloud setting | Capabilities for sharing with Power BI Service |
| Security | Fundamental security measures | Enhanced security features, such as security at the role level |
| Mobile Compatibility | Reports that are browser-accessible and optimized for mobile | There are mobile apps for viewing dashboards. |
Which Should You Go For? Power BI or Looker Studio?
Looker Studio and Power BI aren’t comparable – they have different features. They are best suited for different needs, even though they can be used together to help integrate and visualize data.
If your company still needs to define a BI strategy, Looker Studio is more versatile and appropriate since it’s free and has several connectors to data sources. However, Looker Studio is still a limited tool (it needs additional features such as predictive or advanced analytics, even though it allows calculated fields) so it’s easy to create simple, full interactive dashboards.
However, Power BI’s more robust, higher-level, and more sophisticated tools will tackle the more complex modeling and operations if your BI strategy requires data association between different tables across data sources. Based on your BI budget, you can scale your operations as you go up each tier.
Choosing Between Power BI and Google Looker Studio: Key Takeaways
The final decision between Power BI and Google Looker Studio will depend on the needs, budgetary constraints, and infrastructure that your company already has. Companies seeking advanced reporting capabilities and analytics might consider PowerBI an important tool if they have already used other Microsoft products. On the other hand, Google Looker Studio offers a free, easy-to-follow solution and might be preferable to companies looking for a simple product that fosters teamwork.
After reviewing your needs and weighing the pros and cons of each tool, you can select a tool that will meet your data visualization and analysis goals. Whether you choose, Google Looker Studio or Power BI are fantastic tools for taking companies to the next level by helping enhance data-driven decisions and creating a competitive advantage in the market.
