Looker Studio vs Microsoft Power BI vs Sisense comparison

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Looker Studio

Microsoft Power BI

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Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between Looker Studio, Microsoft Power BI, and Sisense based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out what your peers are saying about Microsoft, Salesforce, Oracle and others in Reporting.

To learn more, read our detailed Reporting Report (Updated: August 2025).

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Reporting

August 2025

Helped 867,836 peers since 2012

Review summaries and opinions

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

Mindshare comparison

As of September 2025, in the Reporting category, the mindshare of Looker Studio is 3.0%, up from 2.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Microsoft Power BI is 24.3%, down from 26.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Sisense is 2.2%, down from 2.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Reporting Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
Microsoft Power BI	24.3%
Looker Studio	3.0%
Sisense	2.2%
Other	70.5%

Reporting

Featured Reviews

Vijay Subramanyam

Delivery Head at cblsolutions

The ability to perform aggregation before visualization allows for effective data slicing and dicing

Looker's ability to perform aggregation before visualization allows for effective data slicing and dicing. The seamless integration with Excel and Google Sheets and custom filter creation features facilitate detailed trend reports and analysis. Looker has significantly improved productivity by reducing the time spent on creating summary reports from weeks to a day.

Facilitates seamless data aggregation with some outdated visual elements hindering user appeal

Shoury Priyanshu

Senior Manager, Strategy & Consulting at Viacom18 Media Pvt Ltd

Real-time data integration is an area for improvement. Although I've worked on several solutions involving real-time integration, it's not very user-friendly and often lags, especially with over a million data rows. This makes Power BI difficult to manage as loading times can reach one or two minutes, which is problematic today. There are challenges with scalability, requiring multiple pages in dashboards to manage these issues. Visualization could be improved as it appears outdated. Users, especially newcomers, find it unappealing and not user-friendly.

Helps businesses save time and offers good integration features

Wiboon Thabsuwan

Senior Consultant at IMD Company Limited

I would say that using Sisense on Linux's platform might not be advantageous for everyone. I am more familiar with Windows than Linux. With Windows, the system performs very fast. Even if your data size consists of like 10,00,00,000 loads or whatever, it works very fast. When using Sisense, it is better to have some people with a very good understanding of Linux. I need more technical people who understand about Linux OS. Only two people would be enough to operate the tool.

More Microsoft Power BI pros

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Looker's ability to perform aggregation before visualization allows for effective data slicing and dicing."

"The ability to design complex data models and equations."

"The solution is free so that is a good feature."

"Valuable features include advanced integrated analysis and easy implementation."

"The integration with Excel and Google Sheets is a valuable feature, making it easy to access and visualize data."

"The ability to integrate with a great variety of data sources."

"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."

"I am impressed with the tool's scheduling mechanism, refresh mechanism, and different types of charts."

More Looker Studio pros

"My favorite feature is the power query editor, where it can do the data transformations."

"It is easy to work with and very chic."

"The fact that you can visualize items is great."

"It's quite flexible, and it's easy to create reports using this system. It is very graphic and very user friendly."

"Power BI is a general-use visualization system. I can express the performance of our network through high-level key performance indicators."

"The solution is not that difficult to install, although this will vary with the experience of the person responsible for its installation."

"PowerBI – Self-service BI."

"Very intuitive and easy to use."

"A very simple setup: Easy to download, install, and updates are pain free."

"Visually displaying data."

"Whenever we have an issue or are unsure how to proceed, they manage to simplify the issue and help us execute it in a graceful and scalable way."

"The Sisense solution was very easy to set up, and its visualizations were effective."

"The most valuable thing I have found is the ability for Sisense to connect data from totally different sources."

"We like that this solution allows us to use data cubes to set up specific visualizations."

"The Sisense solution was very easy to set up, and its visualizations were effective."

"The dashboard design interface is very intuitive and allows you to quickly and easily produce professional, innovative dashboards."

More Sisense pros

Cons

"The performance of Looker needs improvement, particularly the report loading time, which is critical for business users."

"Insisting on forums, blogs and community outreach in communications, and posting videos on an established calendar would be useful."

"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."

"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."

"From the perspective of infrastructure, I cannot provide a valuable opinion on the ease of use and customization options of Looker Studio."

"The tool should improve on live data integration for quicker data reflection."

"The challenges with Google Data Studio are associated with the security part, making it an area where improvements are required."

"Other tools might be worth considering if you need more advanced features or support for a larger user base."

More Looker Studio cons

"Microsoft BI comes under pressure when there is a lot of data to be crunched. It gets slower and slower, and the functionality becomes a bit of a problem. The performance goes down with data being fed into the system. The infrastructure requirement also increases if you have to increase the performance. This is the area that can be improved in my opinion. Initially, the product is good, but over the years, when data gets accumulated, it becomes a problem unless the old data is kind of archived and is no longer shown on the visualization. It has a feature by using which a user can query for a report through simple questions to a bot. So, if I want to look for the customer share of revenue by geography, I just simply state that in the chatbot. If I wanted it in a pie chart, then you say, "Please show it to me in a pie chart." It comes out well for basic charts. This feature should be improvised more so that people can very quickly get customized reports on the go."

"Not having to login again after a mobile app upgrade. A simple login on mobile would be great."

"Real-time refreshing for SAP BW would be nice. We know its on the radar for the development team at MS. "

"The significant drawback I notice is that Microsoft's size makes it hard to get specific change requests addressed unless they involve a bug."

"The dashboards lack a user-friendly appearance."

"The initial installation is difficult."

"It has limited performance capabilities in terms of connecting to large transactional databases, but it is fine for simple and quick queries from Excel spreadsheets or one table. The premium level is going to be more applicable for the higher transaction-level databases."

"I am a SAP user and I would like this tool to have more connectors - and to more easily connect to - the ERP or SAP environment."

More Microsoft Power BI cons

"I would like Sisense to improve its performance, particularly when we are dealing with large-scale data."

"I would like to see an improvement in the live data connection, specifically making the process faster."

"Larger datasets will sometimes give a "Accumulated logs" error when trying to make minor changes. T"

"They should improve the filters to create downloaded data by moving them to the top of the dashboard."

"I would love to have more customization capabilities for building dashboards, especially in creating custom widget sizes."

"The administrative side of Sisense is a little cumbersome and confusing."

"I would like to see more development and growth for the support of Knowledge Base and Community forums."

"I would also like to be able to run a bursts of reports based on different field values with PDF output right in the tool, rather than filtering on each field value and generating each PDF manually."

More Sisense cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."

"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 price of the license can be better."

"The solution’s pricing is reasonable."

"The solution is priced well for what they offer. However, the premium version is very expensive."

"Microsoft BI is considered to be competitively priced when compared to other similar solutions in the market."

"Remove the cost of a licence to show a dashboard within SharePoint. Why should readers of a dashboard have to pay to view? "

"Microsoft BI is not expensive."

"Power BI's price is reasonable, especially if you can put it in some bigger package and use it with other products. The value of a solution doesn't just come from its features as a standalone product. The price should also reflect how easy it's to set up, clean data, and integrate with other solutions."

"I'm not very familiar with the licensing aspect, as it operates in the cloud as a SaaS (Software as a Service) model. Essentially, you pay based on cloud cost models, which might include hourly rates or similar billing structures introduced by Microsoft. Many organizations utilize it and pay for its services, somewhat like Office 365. It's a cloud-based platform that provides the necessary services, including support, for development, and you pay accordingly for the usage."

More Microsoft Power BI pricing and cost advice

"Compared to Power BI or Tableau, Sisense is much more expensive."

"This solution is more expensive than Tableau, Qlik and Dundas. It is an expensive tool. They charge $75,000 while Tableau is $45,000."

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Comparison Review

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

12%

Financial Services Firm

11%

Manufacturing Company

10%

University

Financial Services Firm

12%

Computer Software Company

Government

Manufacturing Company

Financial Services Firm

17%

Computer Software Company

11%

Government

University

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	6
Midsize Enterprise	3
Large Enterprise	5

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	134
Midsize Enterprise	57
Large Enterprise	165

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	26
Midsize Enterprise	7
Large Enterprise	11

Questions from the Community

The company dashboard is useful because we could share it via a link as a reminder for everyone to check it weekly. W...

What needs improvement with Google Data Studio?

We are aware that there are areas in Looker Studio that could be improved. Out of the box, if you don't utilize a tem...

What is your primary use case for Google Data Studio?

Regarding the product, I was doing research for a client in the LMS industry. I was seeing what else was out there an...

Seeking lightweight open source BI software

There are many...It would rather depend what System BI architecture or Enterprise legacy you have at your end...I wou...

Is Power BI a complete platform or only a visualization tool?

Power BI is an advanced visualization tool oriented to big data with a very complete set of widgets to visualize info...

How does Oracle OBIEE compare with Microsoft BI?

Oracle OBIEE is great in allowing design and creativity per the individual needs of the organization. Dashboards are ...

What needs improvement with Sisense?

I would like to see an improvement in the live data connection, specifically making the process faster. Additionally,...

What is your primary use case for Sisense?

I was looking into some of our business operations with tow truck companies. I focused on evaluating turnaround times...

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Sisense?

There was no significant difference in pricing between Sisense and ThoughtSpot. They were practically dead even from ...

Amazon QuickSight vs Looker Studio

Comparisons

Compared 43% of the time

Tableau Enterprise vs Looker Studio

Compared 7% of the time

Qlik Sense vs Looker Studio

Compared 4% of the time

IBM Cognos vs Looker Studio

Compared 4% of the time

Databricks vs Looker Studio

Compared 3% of the time

More Looker Studio Competitors

Tableau Enterprise vs Microsoft Power BI

Compared 13% of the time

Amazon QuickSight vs Microsoft Power BI

Compared 10% of the time

Databricks vs Microsoft Power BI

Compared 7% of the time

Domo vs Microsoft Power BI

Compared 7% of the time

KNIME Business Hub vs Microsoft Power BI

Compared 5% of the time

More Microsoft Power BI Competitors

Tableau Enterprise vs Sisense

Compared 19% of the time

Apache Superset vs Sisense

Compared 12% of the time

Qlik Sense vs Sisense

Compared 9% of the time

Amazon QuickSight vs Sisense

Compared 7% of the time

Domo vs Sisense

Compared 5% of the time

More Sisense Competitors

Product Reports

Download Looker Studio product report

Looker Studio

September 2025

Download Microsoft Power BI product report

Microsoft Power BI

September 2025

Download Sisense product report

August 2025

Also Known As

Data Studio

SSRS, SSAS, MSBI, MS Reporting Services, Microsoft BI Tools, Microsoft Big Data, Power BI Pro, MS BI

No data available

Overview

Google Looker Studio is a free tool designed to help users create visually appealing reports and dashboards, making data easier to understand. It allows you to connect to various data sources such as Google Analytics, Facebook Ads, and spreadsheets. With Looker Studio, you can create charts and graphs to showcase trends and comparisons, build comprehensive dashboards that provide an overview of your data, and customize reports to match your brand or preferences. Additionally, you can share your reports online or export them as PDFs for wider distribution.

Google

Microsoft Power BI is a powerful tool for data analysis and visualization. This tool stands out for its ability to merge and analyze data from various sources. Widely adopted across different industries and departments, Power BI is instrumental in creating visually appealing dashboards and generating insightful business intelligence reports. Its intuitive interface, robust visualization capabilities, and seamless integration with other Microsoft applications empower users to easily create interactive reports and gain valuable insights.

Microsoft

Sisense is an end-to-end business analytics software that enables users to easily prepare and analyze large, complex datasets. Sisense’s Single-Stack BI software includes data preparation, data management, analysis, visualization and reporting capabilities.