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Birst vs Looker Studio comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Mar 4, 2025

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

Birst
Ranking in Reporting
26th
Average Rating
7.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
20
Ranking in other categories
Embedded BI (19th)
Looker Studio
Ranking in Reporting
9th
Average Rating
7.6
Reviews Sentiment
5.4
Number of Reviews
16
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of October 2026, in the Reporting category, the mindshare of Birst is 1.1%, up from 0.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Looker Studio is 2.5%, down from 3.1% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Reporting Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Looker Studio2.5%
Birst1.1%
Other96.4%
Reporting
 

Featured Reviews

SK
Principal Engineering Manager I at a computer software company with 201-500 employees
Offers dashboards and self-service reports. The report performance is very slow.
Dashboards and self-service reports. These are widely used by customers in the EPM domain Most of our customers are interested in dashboards and self-service reports. We are able to offer them these features with this solution. Customer support takes lot of time to get a solution The report…
Heron Ziegel - PeerSpot reviewer
Project Engineer at Quartz Consulting Group
Has supported quick dashboard creation and data sharing but lacks tools for managing multiple reports efficiently
We integrated Looker Studio with other platforms in our data ecosystem; we tried integrating with Sheets, and that went okay, but it could have been better. It could have been better because it needed a very specific format to read the data, so we had to reformat the sheet file. Looker Studio was mostly just helpful in that it provided live updating charts for tracking performance indicators in the organization. Integrating with a database was very difficult because there wasn't a lot of feedback for what was going wrong with the connection. I don't remember if we reached out to support. I didn't personally reach out, but my boss may have. I didn't reach out to support, so I do not have experience with it to rate it. We worked with the free version of Looker Studio initially, and we upgraded at some point to the pro version; I don't remember if we actually paid for it or if it was just a free trial. The pricing was reasonable. I remember doing a price comparison, and it was pretty reasonable, but it did have fewer features than a lot of other software, which was okay for a comparable price but a little cheaper.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"Cloud based BI that can be accessed from anywhere, anytime from mobiles, iPods, tablets, and PCs."
"This is the best cloud based BI platform/solution out there."
"The fact that it is completely cloud based makes the maintenance easier since we don't have the onus of maintaining the server."
"This tool possesses valuable features such as its ability to perform ETL, extract data from various sources (flat files, relational DBs, application connectors) and dashboard scheduling."
"The impact of Birst has been felt company-wide."
"We have been able to scale pretty quickly and easily; it has been a great experience and I love this product."
"Users can jump to the Birst dashboard from SFDC without a repeat login."
"It has given us the ability to join all our data sources into one place to streamline reporting and analytics."
"The solution is free so that is a good feature."
"The product's initial setup phase is very simple."
"We previously used Microsoft Power BI, but Google is better."
"This has improved our organization by allowing people to see their data and develop visualizations themselves."
"What I appreciate about Looker Studio is mostly the clean visuals, which is good, as I prefer a dashboard with a clean aesthetic rather than feeling sort of an old Windows type of dashboard."
"The fact that Looker Studio is free and has a free tier was probably the biggest benefit; it is very accessible and not too difficult to use."
"The best thing about the tool is that it allows you to share information easily and dashboards with colleagues and teammates because it's all online. No matter where you are, as long as you have the Internet, you can connect and use these dashboards. Google made good documentation for this tool. There are many examples of how to use and create dashboards and videos on YouTube. So, I think it's easy to learn."
"The most valuable features of this solution are its ease of use and the plethora of query sources."
 

Cons

"The cost-benefit was not great."
"Performance was not that great; in-memory processing would help."
"As the volume of data gets bigger and bigger, so does the extraction/processing of the data and the dashboard rendering."
"My own experience just made me think that this was a hidden cost that they tried to hide, but keeping that in mind, it might only be my experience as to how this surfaced for us, because I had this image of Birst that you pay this amount and get everything."
"Release management and version control are poor or not available."
"We are yet to realize the real return on the investment given the need to alter the underlying intention of the product’s use."
"I would like to see better connection functionality. It is not very intuitive and the UI is kind of neglected."
"The administration module was built using flash. It is clunky and outdated."
"The performance of Looker needs improvement, particularly the report loading time, which is critical for business users."
"Panels are not as easy to use as other data extraction UIs."
"The tool should improve on live data integration for quicker data reflection."
"The tool should come up with data modeling layer features that are present in other products like Power BI."
"Looker Studio did not fit our needs for scalability."
"The tool has a lot of room for improvement. It's not very professional and allows for only simple tasks like indicating KPIs or quick calculations. It lacks a good calculation-based language like Power BI's DAX, making it less suitable for professional use. Additionally, the variety of visualization tools is limited, and customization options are restricted."
"There are issues with integration and I encountered limits and warnings, especially with my pivot table size."
"Stability and scalability an be improved for a full ten."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Please negotiate on the price and purchase the latest version."
"The tool is free."
"I think the tool is cheap because you don't need to pay anything for using the tool. However, when connecting and analyzing other data sources, you should consider where to analyze this information because Google Data Studio doesn't handle much data well. You must also consider how you will connect this data to it. In this case, you might need to hire DevOps or a data team to help with these issues."
"The solution is free but the Google Looker is expensive."
"The cost is quite affordable based on feature analysis."
"The product is available for free."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Outsourcing Company
17%
Construction Company
15%
Financial Services Firm
14%
Marketing Services Firm
7%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Comms Service Provider
8%
Computer Software Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business3
Midsize Enterprise7
Large Enterprise12
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business7
Midsize Enterprise3
Large Enterprise6
 

Questions from the Community

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What needs improvement with Google Data Studio?
I would appreciate improvements in the data modeling features, as it's not straightforward, and it's not what people in analytics are used to. Specifically, most people using this visualization too...
What is your primary use case for Google Data Studio?
I used Looker Studio mainly for reporting, where I created multiple dashboards on it. I wouldn't say I made the most of the usage of the connections because all the connections were based on flat f...
What advice do you have for others considering Google Data Studio?
I confirm that we have a call regarding my experience with Zoho. Looker Studio is a good visualization tool, but I wouldn't say there's a specific feature that stands out in terms of tracking metri...
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

No data available
Data Studio
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Citrix Systems, Jive Software, SunnyD, Toshiba Medical Systems, Cisco OpenDNS, RB, Sunny D, Vertafore
Genesys, Shueisha
Find out what your peers are saying about Birst vs. Looker Studio and other solutions. Updated: September 2026.
917,433 professionals have used our research since 2012.