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Databricks vs Looker Studio comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

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

Databricks
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
93
Ranking in other categories
Cloud Data Warehouse (4th), Data Science Platforms (1st), Data Management Platforms (DMP) (5th), Streaming Analytics (1st)
Looker Studio
Average Rating
7.6
Reviews Sentiment
5.4
Number of Reviews
16
Ranking in other categories
Reporting (12th)
 

Mindshare comparison

While both are Business Intelligence solutions, they serve different purposes. Databricks is designed for Cloud Data Warehouse and holds a mindshare of 10.2%, up 9.0% compared to last year.
Looker Studio, on the other hand, focuses on Reporting, holds 2.5% mindshare, down 2.7% since last year.
Cloud Data Warehouse Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Databricks10.2%
Snowflake14.9%
Teradata8.8%
Other66.1%
Cloud Data Warehouse
Reporting Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Looker Studio2.5%
Tableau Enterprise14.5%
Microsoft Power BI14.1%
Other68.9%
Reporting
 

Featured Reviews

SimonRobinson - PeerSpot reviewer
Governance And Engagement Lead
Improved data governance has enabled sensitive data tracking but cost management still needs work
I believe we could improve Databricks integration with cloud service providers. The impact of our current integration has not been particularly good, and it's becoming very expensive for us. The inefficiencies in our implementation, such as not shutting down warehouses when they're not in use or reserving the right number of credits, have led to increased costs. We made several beginner mistakes, such as not taking advantage of incremental loading and running overly complicated queries all the time. We should be using ETL tools to help us instead of doing it directly in Databricks. We need more experienced professionals to manage Databricks effectively, as it's not as forgiving as other platforms such as Snowflake. I think introducing customer repositories would facilitate easier implementation with Databricks.
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

"The setup was straightforward."
"There are good features for turning off clusters."
"The most valuable features of the solution are the hardware and the resources it quickly provides without much hassle."
"A very valuable feature is the data processing, and the solution is specifically good at using the Spark ecosystem."
"Databricks gives us the ability to build a lakehouse framework and do everything implicit to this type of database structure."
"The time travel feature is the solution's most valuable aspect."
"Databricks allowed us to go from non-existent insights (because the datasets were just too large) to immediate and rich insights once the datasets were ingested into our PySpark notebooks."
"The capacity of use of the different types of coding is valuable. Databricks also has good performance because it is running in spark extra storage, meaning the performance and the capacity use different kinds of codes."
"I would rate this solution eight or nine out of ten."
"This solution is a powerful way to have several tools integrated at one location and convert data into beautiful reports that can be easily edited and viewed."
"Data Studio integrates seamlessly with other Google products, and we can use it with other APIs if we like."
"The ability to integrate with a great variety of data sources."
"The product's initial setup phase is very simple."
"This is a great tool if your organization leverages other sets of Google tools and needs some quick ideas that are a prettier and more interactive than Google Analytics."
"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 integration with Excel and Google Sheets is a valuable feature, making it easy to access and visualize data."
 

Cons

"In the next release, I would like to see more optimization features."
"In my opinion, areas of Databricks that have room for improvement involve the dashboards. Until recently, everyone used third-party systems such as Power BI to connect to Databricks for dashboards and reports, but they're now coming up with their IBI dashboard, and I think they're on the right track to improve that even further."
"It would be great if Databricks could integrate all the cloud platforms."
"For a small workload, Databricks may not be worth the costs."
"The first deployment is difficult. It is not straightforward and you have to think about a lot of stuff."
"So far, we're not measuring any return on investment, such as saving time, money, or resources with Databricks."
"The cost of this solution is high, on the expensive side."
"The solution is expensive. It's not like a lot of competitors, which are open-source."
"There are issues with integration and I encountered limits and warnings, especially with my pivot table size."
"The tool should improve on live data integration for quicker data reflection."
"Stability and scalability an be improved for a full ten."
"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."
"Panels are not as easy to use as other data extraction UIs."
"Looker Studio did not fit our needs for scalability."
"The tool should improve on live data integration for quicker data reflection."
"Insisting on forums, blogs and community outreach in communications, and posting videos on an established calendar would be useful."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The solution uses a pay-per-use model with an annual subscription fee or package. Typically this solution is used on a cloud platform, such as Azure or AWS, but more people are choosing Azure because the price is more reasonable."
"We have only incurred the cost of our AWS cloud services. This is because during this period, Databricks provided us with an extended evaluation period, and we have not spent much money yet. We are just starting to incur costs this month, I will know more later on the full cost perspective."
"I am based in South Africa, where it is expensive adapting to the cloud, and then there is the price for the tool itself."
"The cost for Databricks depends on the use case. I work on it as a consultant, so I'm using the client's Databricks, so it depends on how big the client is."
"I rate the price of Databricks as eight out of ten."
"The product pricing is moderate."
"The cost is around $600,000 for 50 users."
"We implement this solution on behalf of our customers who have their own Azure subscription and they pay for Databricks themselves. The pricing is more expensive if you have large volumes of data."
"The cost is quite affordable based on feature analysis."
"The product is available for 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 tool is free."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
18%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Computer Software Company
7%
Healthcare Company
5%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Computer Software Company
10%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Retailer
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business27
Midsize Enterprise12
Large Enterprise56
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business7
Midsize Enterprise3
Large Enterprise6
 

Questions from the Community

Which do you prefer - Databricks or Azure Machine Learning Studio?
Databricks gives you the option of working with several different languages, such as SQL, R, Scala, Apache Spark, or Python. It offers many different cluster choices and excellent integration with ...
How would you compare Databricks vs Amazon SageMaker?
We researched AWS SageMaker, but in the end, we chose Databricks. Databricks is a Unified Analytics Platform designed to accelerate innovation projects. It is based on Spark so it is very fast. It...
Which would you choose - Databricks or Azure Stream Analytics?
Databricks is an easy-to-set-up and versatile tool for data management, analysis, and business analytics. For analytics teams that have to interpret data to further the business goals of their orga...
What do you like most about Google Data Studio?
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, all...
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...
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

Databricks Unified Analytics, Databricks Unified Analytics Platform, Redash
Data Studio
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Elsevier, MyFitnessPal, Sharethrough, Automatic Labs, Celtra, Radius Intelligence, Yesware
Genesys, Shueisha
Find out what your peers are saying about Snowflake Computing, Teradata, Google and others in Cloud Data Warehouse. Updated: May 2026.
893,221 professionals have used our research since 2012.