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Birst vs Looker Studio comparison

 

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
28th
Average Rating
7.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
20
Ranking in other categories
Embedded BI (19th)
Looker Studio
Ranking in Reporting
10th
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 June 2026, in the Reporting category, the mindshare of Birst is 1.0%, up from 0.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Looker Studio is 2.5%, down from 2.9% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Reporting Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Looker Studio2.5%
Birst1.0%
Other96.5%
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

"Birst uses several connection methods to take data in from your data sources and stages it into its own data mart, and this staging from several sources makes Birst a fairly robust data warehouse solution."
"The fact that it is completely cloud based makes the maintenance easier since we don't have the onus of maintaining the server."
"Birst is a great tool for: Creating a simple data warehouse Uploading data for quick analysis, visualizations, and dashboards"
"Cloud based BI that can be accessed from anywhere, anytime from mobiles, iPods, tablets, and PCs."
"If you are looking for a cloud-based, lightweight data mart and reporting, this tool is good."
"The impact of Birst has been felt company-wide."
"Scalability is one of the core features of this product that makes Birst great."
"It has given us the ability to join all our data sources into one place to streamline reporting and analytics."
"The integration with Excel and Google Sheets is a valuable feature, making it easy to access and visualize data."
"We previously used Microsoft Power BI, but Google is better."
"The most valuable features of this solution are its ease of use and the plethora of query sources."
"I am impressed with the tool's scheduling mechanism, refresh mechanism, and different types of charts."
"The ability to design complex data models and equations."
"I find it favorable regarding speed of development, ease of building, and flexibility."
"The company dashboard is useful because we could share it via a link as a reminder for everyone to check it weekly. We observed the progress of our portfolio from last week to the current week, allowing us to compare revenues."
"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."
 

Cons

"I would want to see some improvement in the user management module."
"The initial setup was extremely complex. The Birst consultants wasted a lot of time in configuring the system."
"I would like to see stronger in-built permissions capabilities."
"For complex reports with heavy calculations, performance can be improved."
"There were stability issues with Birst. A dashboard/report takes a lot of time to open if there is a lot of data."
"Error logging is cumbersome to work through to find issues."
"The administration module was built using flash. It is clunky and outdated."
"I would like to see better connection functionality. It is not very intuitive and the UI is kind of neglected."
"Insisting on forums, blogs and community outreach in communications, and posting videos on an established calendar would be useful."
"It's not yet a replacement for a complete BI tool."
"The challenges with Google Data Studio are associated with the security part, making it an area where improvements are required."
"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."
"There are issues with integration and I encountered limits and warnings, especially with my pivot table size."
"When you physically install a product on one machine instead of the cloud, you have a better visibility, best icon quality, etc.. It's more of an issue with how we are adapting to the transition. We are still in the early moments of using this tool, and we need to go deeper to discover some improvements."
"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."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Please negotiate on the price and purchase the latest version."
"The tool is free."
"The cost is quite affordable based on feature analysis."
"The solution is free but the Google Looker is expensive."
"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 product is available for free."
report
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Construction Company
20%
Financial Services Firm
17%
Marketing Services Firm
10%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Computer Software Company
9%
Comms Service Provider
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

Ask a question
Earn 20 points
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: June 2026.
900,644 professionals have used our research since 2012.