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Looker Studio vs Windward Core 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

Looker Studio
Ranking in Reporting
10th
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.6
Number of Reviews
14
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Windward Core
Ranking in Reporting
23rd
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.6
Number of Reviews
36
Ranking in other categories
Document Generation Tools (1st)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of October 2025, in the Reporting category, the mindshare of Looker Studio is 3.1%, up from 2.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Windward Core is 0.9%, up from 0.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Reporting Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Looker Studio3.1%
Windward Core0.9%
Other96.0%
Reporting
 

Featured Reviews

Vijay Subramanyam - PeerSpot reviewer
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.
CH
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.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"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."
"Looker's ability to perform aggregation before visualization allows for effective data slicing and dicing."
"Valuable features include advanced integrated analysis and easy implementation."
"The solution is free so that is a good feature."
"Data Studio integrates seamlessly with other Google products, and we can use it with other APIs if we like."
"Technical support is ​very good. They reply immediately and follow-up with any questions.​"
"From an integration perspective, they provide the code for you to easily integrate with existing applications."
"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."
"We ended up going with Windward for the level of support we got from them during our proof of concept."
"Thanks to Windward, our documents need very few tweaks and are usually "customer-ready" right out of the box."
"We can develop any report at least five times faster.​"
"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."
"​Creating dynamic table of contents (TOC) based on dynamic data in different reports."
 

Cons

"There is a significant degree of sophistication required to compete with Tableau or Cognos."
"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."
"Other tools might be worth considering if you need more advanced features or support for a larger user base."
"From the perspective of infrastructure, I cannot provide a valuable opinion on the ease of use and customization options of Looker Studio."
"Insisting on forums, blogs and community outreach in communications, and posting videos on an established calendar would be useful."
"There are issues with integration and I encountered limits and warnings, especially with my pivot table size."
"It's not yet a replacement for a complete BI tool."
"There is always room for improvement in the speed, especially with the complex, multi-line Excel spreadsheets. They made some improvements in the last version that are quantum-fold faster than when I first started. But there is always room for improvement there. You always want reports faster and faster."
"We would like to shrink these reports into one page, because there is a lot of free space on one page, but we cannot shrink it into the one page to be shorter. This is one thing we would like to change."
"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 tool does not support macOS documents."
"It is software, so there are always times where things don't work. Most of the time issues happen when trying to move to a new version. There might be problems with reports that were created in an older version, so either we have to make a tweak to the templates or we report it to them and get them to make an adjustment to their software."
"They're not a gigantic company, so they just don't have all the capital to do whatever they would want to do. That's the only reason I would hold back even that one point. I know that if I do ask for something, I'll get it. I just know that it will take some time."
"About six months ago, we raised the possibility of improving the way they manage the HTML 5. Sometimes, when you insert a lot of data in the data source, you get an error because it is not managing HTML 5 features well. I believe they have addressed this in later versions of their product."
"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."
 

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 product is available for free."
"The cost is quite affordable based on feature analysis."
"The tool is free."
"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 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."
"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."
"The cost is reasonable."
"It is absolutely worth the value. They have flexibility, depending on what you're looking for from a buying standpoint. The current pricing models are quite flexible, with the ability to use it on an as-needed basis, or to get a perpetual license that covers a customer that might have extensive needs. I think it's pretty good."
"CapEx fits our requirements, OpEx is higher due to the 20% service and maintenance cost, where we normally pay 15%."
"For what you're getting, it's an extremely good value."
"Pricing is something I complain about. Production pricing is okay, but for a testing environment the pricing looks a bit high to me."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
12%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Manufacturing Company
10%
University
8%
Financial Services Firm
18%
Performing Arts
10%
Computer Software Company
10%
Comms Service Provider
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business6
Midsize Enterprise3
Large Enterprise6
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business19
Midsize Enterprise4
Large Enterprise8
 

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...
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 template or create a template, which can take significant time, it's not the most u...
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 and why certain things were pulling for certain reasons. I wouldn't say I'm techni...
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Also Known As

Data Studio
Windward, Windward Studios
 

Overview

 

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
Find out what your peers are saying about Looker Studio vs. Windward Core and other solutions. Updated: September 2025.
869,566 professionals have used our research since 2012.