Looker Studio vs Microsoft Power BI vs ThoughtSpot 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 ThoughtSpot based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

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To learn more, read our detailed Reporting Report (Updated: March 2026).

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Review summaries and opinions

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

Mindshare comparison

Reporting Mindshare Distribution
Product	Mindshare (%)
Looker Studio	2.6%
Microsoft Power BI	17.4%
Tableau Enterprise	16.5%
Other	63.5%

Reporting

BI (Business Intelligence) Tools Mindshare Distribution
Product	Mindshare (%)
Microsoft Power BI	9.3%
Tableau Enterprise	6.7%
Amazon QuickSight	3.7%
Other	80.3%

BI (Business Intelligence) Tools

BI (Business Intelligence) Tools Mindshare Distribution
Product	Mindshare (%)
ThoughtSpot	1.6%
Microsoft Power BI	9.3%
Tableau Enterprise	6.7%
Other	82.4%

BI (Business Intelligence) Tools

Featured Reviews

Heron Ziegel

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.

Data integration has improved reserving and expense control while collaboration drives fast dashboards

Antonio Flor

Lead Anaplanner at Chaucer Group

Regarding drawbacks or weak points in Microsoft Power BI, it may not be directly related to the tool itself, but with our architecture, as we couldn't get a service account, which is an email address that has no relationship with the employees, just to establish the connection with Anaplan. We couldn't get it to work on SSO, so we use an employee account which could be a point of weakness, meaning if the person leaves, that connection will break. If the person goes on holiday and we need to refresh, we have to change the connection as well, but we have to live with that since we're not using SSO on the service account. Regarding the natural language processing feature, we're trying to avoid using it too much because it can slow down the connection, so as much as possible, we try to build the logic and any transformation in Anaplan, and then deliver an end product to Microsoft Power BI.

Self-service analytics has empowered teams and now drives faster data-driven decisions

Purity Wairimu

Financial Analyst at Nestlé

I have an experience of four years using ThoughtSpot. ThoughtSpot is very easy to use. Even non-technical users find it very easy to use and user-friendly. Some of the best features ThoughtSpot offers are innovation, ease of use, and data analytics. Reporting development is also pretty easy, making complex formulas slightly easier. Additionally, dashboarding for non-technical people, easy search of data, ease of getting insights, AI-driven analytics, and the ability to easily build charts are highlights. ThoughtSpot also offers data connection with live data sources. ThoughtSpot's scalability is impressive; it can handle large data easily, and performance has been powerful and reliable. The AI-driven analytics capabilities in ThoughtSpot help to predict future outcomes and are very helpful in tracking data, and performance is great.

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

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

"Data Studio integrates seamlessly with other Google products, and we can use it with other APIs if we like."

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

"This has improved our organization by allowing people to see their data and develop visualizations themselves."

"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."

"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."

"We previously used Microsoft Power BI, but Google is better."

More Looker Studio pros

"It works well, especially when implementing the whole stack of Microsoft BI solution including SSAS for data modeling and SSIS for ETL."

"Microsoft BI has helped out the organization because it has brought visibility of our data across the organization allowing everyone to see the same metrics."

"There is a lot of help and documentation on the Internet, so no special training is needed to use the source code."

"I liked that Microsoft Power BI handles a large amount of data. I can handle hundreds of rows from Postgres in a few minutes. I also like how it detects the relationship between the tables without explicitly saying that. It just detects the relationship automatically. That made it easier to work with the data."

"Microsoft BI is worth it."

"The most valuable features are the flexibility, how many ways you can interrogate the data, and the the graphical visualization."

"The best feature for me is Power Query. I know that probably sounds strange, but you can't do too much with visuals and reports if the backend stuff is horribly dirty and just bad. But for me, that is absolutely fantastic. I can load the data and do the transformation and be able to load it in a useful way. There are tons of connections, which is absolutely fantastic as well. It's been fairly easy, and it's intuitive."

"The interface is great; the DAX function center and integration with Asia have been great, it's a powerful platform, and the product is robust and stable while being very low-maintenance with helpful technical support."

"The tool is user-friendly for the end users."

"The initial setup was very straightforward."

"ThoughtSpot is much easier to work with and maintain than other BI solutions, and it significantly reduces costs related to manual labor."

"The most valuable feature is probably the core functionality itself, which is the ability to search and drill down into any data right out of the box."

"ThoughtSpot empowers businesses to make informed decisions by providing real-time data insights."

"The ability to do ad hoc explorations of data has been most valuable."

"I like ThoughtSpot's search capabilities. You can also create custom analytics even if you aren't an experienced data analyst. We have users with no data analytics experience making some of the dashboards we've created, copying components, and customizing them to their specific use cases."

"The scalability is good."

More ThoughtSpot pros

Cons

"Panels are not as easy to use as other data extraction UIs."

"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."

"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 is a significant degree of sophistication required to compete with Tableau or Cognos."

"Stability and scalability an be improved for a full ten."

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

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

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

More Looker Studio cons

"There are some connector-related issues in their MSBA solution."

"These licenses are in US dollars. With a long-term license, the client is unaffected when the exchange rate goes up. However, if the exchange rate goes down, you don't get refunded from the excess money you've paid."

"The only concern I have faced with Microsoft BI is the time it takes to find out an issue and rectify it."

"Microsoft Power BI was born native on the cloud, however, it's quite difficult when it has to connect to on-premise data sources."

"If I compare it to Tableau, I'd say the visualizations can be better. We should have multiple options. By that I mean, while there are multiple options for the visualization, the look and feel of the dashboard when you compare to Tableau is on the lower side. Tableau has a much better visualization."

"It should be more scalable for an enterprise-level implementation. When you deploy large data sets, the response has to be faster in Power BI."

"I would like to see the product offer more graphics to impact different audiences."

"The reporting part of Microsoft BI is rather limited compared to other reporting tools."

More Microsoft Power BI cons

"The support team gets a six out of ten. They are not as proactive."

"ThoughtSpot lacks an intermediate layer for data loading, unlike Qlik, which affects dashboard stability when the database has issues."

"I would like to see more flexibility in adding the pins. Currently, we have four different sizes in which I can add pins, but I would like to be able to resize my pins."

"The one area of the solution that I do hear needs improvement is on the visualization front."

"The prediction model needs improvement. While NLQ is working perfectly fine and the data understanding capabilities of ThoughtSpot are good, there is room for improvement."

"The visualization customization needs improvement."

"Some areas for improvement include the pixel-perfect dashboards, which are not as refined as those in Tableau."

"ThoughtSpot is a fairly new product, so some usability aspects aren't as mature as we'd like them to be. One example is their organizational methodology, like how objects are organized in their dashboards inside the product. They're all on a flat list, which works if you've got five or 10 dashboards. However, it's insufficient when you're a large enterprise with multiple groups looking at the same dashboards. It isn't organized well."

More ThoughtSpot cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The cost is quite affordable based on feature analysis."

"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."

"The solution is free but the Google Looker is expensive."

"The tool is free."

"Their price is good."

"Its price is very low. It is like $10 per user, per month. The clients pay for their own licenses. It is not on us. There are no costs in addition to the standard licensing fees. That's the beauty. With other systems, you need to spend a couple of thousand dollars just to get started, and then you need to spend $500 per year for the license, which becomes much more costly. You have a system here where for $120 to $140 a year, you can start with two people and start developing and deploying. You can see why the cost difference is huge, especially when you are on a low scale, like us, and you're not building something very huge."

"I used a two months free trial to see if it had what I needed."

"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."

"The current licensing model that Microsoft BI has is expensive. My customers have told me the cost is approximately $20 per user and this can get expensive fast. There should be a one-time purchase option if the customer has a lot of users."

"The licensing can be complicated."

"In the beginning, the solution cost approximately $1,000 per month, we have a Microsoft startup subscription. There is a subscription pack for startups company which we are able to have for one year."

"Its pricing is reasonable for the desktop stuff, but for enterprise-level, it is a little expensive."

More Microsoft Power BI pricing and cost advice

"I give the pricing a six out of ten."

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Comparison Review

it_user79932

Senior Manager - BI Head with 5,001-10,000 employees

Feb 4, 2015

Comparison of SAP BO, Tableau, QlikView, Cognos, Microsoft, OBIEE and Pentaho

1. SAP BO/BI Enterprise scalability Security Ease of use Semantic layer 2. Tableau Visualization Data discovery Turnaround time 3. IBM Cognos Enterprise scalability Security In-memory feature 4. MS BI - Flexibility 5. Pentaho - Open source but still enterprise grade 6. QlikView Data…

What do you like most about Google Data Studio?

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

10%

Manufacturing Company

Financial Services Firm

Comms Service Provider

Financial Services Firm

11%

Manufacturing Company

Government

Computer Software Company

Financial Services Firm

16%

Manufacturing Company

Computer Software Company

Healthcare Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	7
Midsize Enterprise	3
Large Enterprise	6

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	135
Midsize Enterprise	58
Large Enterprise	166

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	3
Midsize Enterprise	1
Large Enterprise	14

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?

I would appreciate improvements in the data modeling features, as it's not straightforward, and it's not what people ...

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 ...

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 is your experience regarding pricing and costs for ThoughtSpot?

The pricing, setup cost, and licensing for ThoughtSpot are competitive, and it is a very user-friendly tool compared ...

What needs improvement with ThoughtSpot?

The customizability of the visualization live boards should be improved. Additional support for more data warehouse s...

What is your primary use case for ThoughtSpot?

My name is Peter Chemo, a Financial Analyst at Nesto. One of the major challenges that ThoughtSpot solves is reducing...

Amazon QuickSight vs Looker Studio

Comparisons

Compared 19% of the time

Tableau Enterprise vs Looker Studio

Compared 9% of the time

RStudio Connect vs Looker Studio

Compared 5% of the time

Zendesk vs Looker Studio

Compared 4% of the time

QlikView vs Looker Studio

Compared 4% of the time

More Looker Studio Competitors

Amazon QuickSight vs Microsoft Power BI

Compared 17% of the time

Tableau Enterprise vs Microsoft Power BI

Compared 14% of the time

Domo vs Microsoft Power BI

Compared 7% of the time

QlikView vs Microsoft Power BI

Compared 2% of the time

More Microsoft Power BI Competitors

Omni vs ThoughtSpot

Compared 10% of the time

Tableau Enterprise vs ThoughtSpot

Compared 7% of the time

Sigma vs ThoughtSpot

Compared 6% of the time

Databricks vs ThoughtSpot

Compared 5% of the time

Hex vs ThoughtSpot

Compared 5% of the time

More ThoughtSpot Competitors

Product Reports

Looker Studio

Download Looker Studio product report

Microsoft Power BI

Download Microsoft Power BI product report

Download ThoughtSpot product report

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

ThoughtSpot is a powerful business intelligence tool that allows easy searching and drilling into data. Its ad hoc exploration and query-based search features are highly valued, and it is easy to set up, stable, and scalable.

The solution is used for reporting purposes, self-service BI, and embedding into other applications for customers to do self-service analytics. It helps businesses with metrics, KPIs, and important insights by sourcing data from various sources into one golden source and visualizing it in an easy way for the business to consume. The pricing model is ideal, charging for data rather than the number of users.