Looker Studio vs Windward Core comparison

Google and Windward Studios are both solutions in the Reporting category. Google is ranked #11 with an average rating of 7.6, while Windward Studios is ranked #19. Google holds a 2.7% mindshare in RT, compared to Windward Studios’s 1.2% mindshare. Additionally, 83% of Google users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 100% of Windward Studios users who would recommend it.

Looker Studio

Read 16 Looker Studio reviews

1,849 Views
869 Comparison Views

83% willing to recommend

Windward Core

Read 36 Windward Core reviews

1,032 Views
774 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

Looker Studio

Windward Core

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Mar 4, 2025

Windward Core and Looker Studio are competing in the data analytics and business intelligence space. Looker Studio holds an advantage in broader business intelligence capabilities due to its data visualization strength, while Windward Core is advantageous for organizations focused on document generation.

Features: Windward Core offers advanced document automation, customized document output, and robust reporting capabilities, making it suitable for enterprises needing document generation. Looker Studio provides interactive dashboards, data exploration, and smooth integration with various data sources, meeting diverse analytical requirements.

Room for Improvement: Windward Core could improve in integration flexibility, support infrastructure, and cloud compatibility. Looker Studio may benefit from enhancing document generation features, refining user customization options, and enabling more robust offline capabilities.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Looker Studio's cloud-based model and strong support options facilitate quick deployment and seamless integration across diverse data environments. Windward Core requires a more hands-on deployment approach, with support focusing on its document-processing needs.

Pricing and ROI: Windward Core's licensing fees may be justified by its document management strength, offering high ROI for document-intensive enterprises. Looker Studio's scalable pricing aligns with business growth, providing a valuable proposition through its comprehensive data analytics features.

To learn more, read our detailed Looker Studio vs. Windward Core Report (Updated: December 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Looker Studio vs. Windward Core

December 2025

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Helped 881,114 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:

Categories and Ranking

Looker Studio

Ranking in Reporting

11th

Average Rating

7.6

Reviews Sentiment

5.4

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Windward Core

Ranking in Reporting

19th

Average Rating

8.8

Reviews Sentiment

7.6

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Document Generation Tools (1st)

Mindshare comparison

As of January 2026, in the Reporting category, the mindshare of Looker Studio is 2.7%, up from 2.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Windward Core is 1.2%, up from 0.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Reporting Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
Looker Studio	2.7%
Windward Core	1.2%
Other	96.1%

Reporting

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.

Read full review

Christopher Heinz

Sr. Systems Analyst at a tech services company with 5,001-10,000 employees

Strong layout and design capabilities; leverages every aspect available in Word-native formatting

The licensing key is a little bit twitchy. I'd like to see more HTML formatting support in templates. It has a basic stock of HTML formatting capability, but it doesn't have a rich vocabulary. I have to work around that sometimes. The help documentation and blog posts are extensive, but not always up to date. The error reports also need improvement. If you don't key it in right, it's a little hard to find the root cause. It gives you information as much as it can, but it doesn't really hone in and tell you explicitly what you should do to correct the problem.

Read full review

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"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 product's initial setup phase is very simple."

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

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

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

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

"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."

More Looker Studio pros

"Thanks to Windward, our documents need very few tweaks and are usually "customer-ready" right out of the box."

"From an integration perspective, they provide the code for you to easily integrate with existing applications."

"One of the features that we have found most important is that the report builder is in Word, so it was very easy to get into it... We could also use some of our existing Word templates."

"AutoTag is valuable because it integrates with MS Word and makes it easy for our users to create template documents and reports. It allows our users to design the templates based on differing needs."

"Managing templates through MS Word, as non technical users can manage output."

"The quality of the layouts and designs is second to none. Windward's ability to help us generate templates, for which we can actually tag documents, is the key feature that we use."

"Another thing our clients absolutely love is the ability to design templates within the Microsoft Office suite, because of how simple it is. They're building off of something that's familiar. When they can build off of that feature, on top of something that's very familiar, that's a plus for them."

"For the designer we use AutoTag which is a Microsoft Word plugin. In general, it's easy to use, it doesn't have a very steep learning curve. It's not difficult, for people who know Microsoft Office well, to start using the AutoTag tool... It feels just like you're in a Microsoft Office environment with some extra functionality."

More Windward Core pros

Cons

"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."

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

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

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

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

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

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

"It's not yet a replacement for a complete BI tool."

More Looker Studio cons

"A lot of clients who want to use this don't have the technical background for the SQL portion of gathering the data. If Windward were to make a more user-friendly SQL extract front-end, that would help a lot of clients to leverage the application a lot more."

"One thing that frustrated us a little bit is that we have to use the Office PDF generation, because the native PDF generation is always slightly different compared to the one in Office. The formatting is just a little bit off here and there... This means that we need to have Office installed on the server to be able to generate these documents via API."

"Regarding AutoTag, we do notice that when you want to refactor a little bit of your template design or when you want to implement changes, sometimes you need a lot of clicks to get the change done. For instance... it would be helpful to be able to find all the identifiers with the old name and replace them with the new name. We haven't found a way to do that with the find-replace tool. Throughout the user-interface of Windward, you need a lot of clicks to get that done."

"They should add a document distribution solution on top of the document generation capability. It should allow us to send the generated document to a certain recipient (e.g. customer contact’s email address) based on a business-rules management system. That system would allow the end-user to manage a relationship between a document template and its recipient."

"The only thing I can think of, that we'd like it to do, would be the ability to "burst out" reports, meaning one section of a report could be sent out as an email to a manager of a department, say, without having to run multiple reports to do it. As it sits now, we have to do multiple reports to do it."

"There are some Excel formatting things that you lose when you implement a template: some default Excel validation scripts, macros. You could create them in Excel if you were just using Excel, but in creating a template that generates a report, some of those validation things are lost."

"Their PDF needs improvement. We've run into some issues when we tried to generate a Word document. If we try to generate the same document in PDF, sometimes it doesn't look exactly the same."

"They could make the document creation performance faster. I'm not saying it's slow but it takes time to create the PDFs. If they could make it faster, that would be one area for improvement."

More Windward Core cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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 tool is free."

"The product is available for free."

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

"The pricing is very reasonable for what it provides. The report builder is about one grand per user... We are paying for a support contract, which is 20 percent of the price, but because the licenses are perpetual, I think the pricing is very reasonable."

"CapEx fits our requirements, OpEx is higher due to the 20% service and maintenance cost, where we normally pay 15%."

"Pricing is something I complain about. Production pricing is okay, but for a testing environment the pricing looks a bit high to me."

"The only problem with the pricing of Windward is the limitation on the number of reports generated. It is costly in that sense. If you want to increase, you have to pay more, based on the number of reports generated per day. It is not the same with Crystal Reports. With the latter, you buy a license at one point in time and that's it."

"We negotiated our prices many years ago, and while they go up a little bit here and there, they've been pretty steady."

"I'm starting to hear clients squeal about the price of their software. The cost of the software has gone up."

"From my experience in this field, the product is reasonably priced, at least with the RESTful engine implementation. It's definitely not a cheap option. People say, "That's a fair amount of money to pay for a document generation tool." At the same time, you do get good functionality and the support is good."

"The pricing is fair. The way that they have it priced is the Windward Designer has a price that's associated with it. Then, depending on the number of cores that you're looking for, that is the price that you pay. The more cores that you want, the more expensive it is."

More Windward Core pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

11%

Manufacturing Company

11%

Computer Software Company

11%

University

Financial Services Firm

13%

Manufacturing Company

Performing Arts

Outsourcing 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	19
Midsize Enterprise	4
Large Enterprise	8

Questions from the Community

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...

See all answers

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...

See all answers

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...

See all answers

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Comparisons

Amazon QuickSight vs Looker Studio

Compared 31% of the time

Microsoft Power BI vs Looker Studio

Compared 14% of the time

Tableau Enterprise vs Looker Studio

Compared 8% of the time

Qlik Sense vs Looker Studio

Compared 4% of the time

IBM Cognos vs Looker Studio

Compared 3% of the time

More Looker Studio Competitors

SAP Crystal Reports vs Windward Core

Compared 21% of the time

Microsoft Power BI vs Windward Core

Compared 17% of the time

OpenText Intelligence vs Windward Core

Compared 13% of the time

Docmosis vs Windward Core

Compared 13% of the time

Domo vs Windward Core

Compared 12% of the time

More Windward Core Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Looker Studio

January 2026

Download Looker Studio product report

Buyer's Guide

Windward Core

January 2026

Download Windward Core product report

Also Known As

Data Studio

Windward, Windward Studios

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

What is Windward Studios?

For over a decade, Windward has been a leader in the software development industry by creating the most innovative and advanced document automation and reporting software on the planet.

Data-Driven Document Automation

Generate stunning documents that incorporate relevant data easily and seamlessly.

Visually Striking Designs

Our software provides innovative tools and features to build beautiful designs and stunning layouts, all within the familiar Microsoft Office Suite. Your imagination is the only limitation.

Agile Document Logic

We offer the best document automation software for the new millennium. With our conditional logic functionality, you can swiftly personalize the document content to gratify your end users.

Huge Time Saver

Looking for faster template creation that enables you to keep pace with your business? With our software, template creation takes minutes and you do not need any programming experience to get it done.

Exceptionally Intuitive Interface

Our program's design offers documents that can be edited, customized and designed using MS Office. Enjoy a stress-free document automation experience in programs you already know.

Efficient Savings

Significantly reduce the resources and time required for template development by using our streamlined template design and document automation tools.

Windward Studios

Sample Customers

Genesys, Shueisha

HAL, Inc., Axe Group, White Clark Group, Blueprint Software, Aspect Security, Nucleus Software, LeBlanc’s Food Stores, South Sound 911, Aegon, Barclays, Fidelity Investments, ArisGlobal LLC, USDA, RepLink, AON Hewitt

Buyer's Guide

Looker Studio vs. Windward Core

December 2025

Free Report: Looker Studio vs. Windward Core

Find out what your peers are saying about Looker Studio vs. Windward Core and other solutions. Updated: December 2025.

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