Looker Studio vs. Tableau Public

Does great at open canvas editing and letting you fully customize without the need for a grid. It is democratizing self-service no-code analytics. You do not need to be a data or analytics engineer to get started, and you can go very far based on how intuitive and straightforward the UI is. Some of the biggest challenges with Looker Studio relate to user management/security, embedding options, and issue support. For a long time, every user needed to have a Gmail to invite them to view a dashboard via login, not sure if that has been improved yet. You can let any user view without logging in, but that is not always recommended due to security reasons. In terms of embedding, you can only iframe dashboards. More sophisticated BI tools let you embed elements via API or Javascript. Iframing dashboards also make drill downs and dashboard to dashboard navigation tricky/near impossible. There is also no ability to contact Google for support when bugs or outages happen. They point everyone to the Data Studio community. There is some ability to get in contact with Google if you have an enterprise-level contract with Google Cloud, but the path for support is very ad hoc and not always fruitful.

Incentivized

Tableau Public is great, especially if you're new to the platform or considering implementing it within an organization. The Public version has most of the capabilities of the full version, with extensive community documentation to troubleshoot issues you may run into. Additionally, there are many resources to check out Public workbooks from other users and communities: a GREAT learning resource to figure out new, innovative ways to visualize and present data. It is perfect for evaluating public datasets, for doing exploratory data analysis, or contributing to cross-organizational or extracurricular projects that may benefit from more sophisticated data analysis and exploration. Tableau Public, because it stores to the cloud and has limitations on connectivity (ie, cannot connect to SQL servers) is not suited for confidential, financial, PII, etc., data, and care should be taken to avoid including sensitive data in any of the Tableau Public workbooks used by an individual or organization.

Incentivized

• Self-service
• Easy to use, point and click
• Little to no training required
• Easy to share internally and externally
• Rich visualizations
• Canned reports
• Easy to copy/paste/dupe existing reports
• Ability to join data sets
• Easy integration with various data sources
• Flexible data integrations, including lowest common denominator (CSV, XLS, G-Sheets)
• Wide range of APIs
• Secure / authentication via Google SSO
• Easy to share / re-assign ownership of reports and data sources

Incentivized

• Tableau Public can work with data that are differently formatted, such as MS Excel, .txt file, Google Sheets, not sure about MS Access.
• GUI interface of Tableau Public is not that hard to start working on; Also, it can generate codes for the operations and so it is relatively easy to visualize and correct mistakes.
• Lots of Tableau Public users upload their work to the online community, users can easily find very good figures/graphs that are similar to their problems and so they can use these figures/graphs as templates to modify and make their own ones.

Incentivized

• Few functionalities are very exclusive only for data studio.
• It's time taking to load data and at the same time only single Data source can be connected.
• When editing the reports you have to switch between Edit and View mode to see how does the change looks like.

• The biggest drawback to the Public version of Tableau is that any data used in the program is 'public' and therefore not secure: workbooks are saved to the cloud, rather than locally
• Tableau Public limits data ingestion to 10 million rows per source
• Limited connections - can't connect to SQL databases to ingest data (must be through CSV, Access, TDE, or text files)

Incentivized

It is the simplest and least expensive way for us to automate our reporting at this time. I like the ability to customize literally everything about each report, and the ability to send out reports automatically in emails. The only issue we have been having recently is a technical glitch in the automatic email report. Sadly, there is almost no support for this tool from Google, but is also free, so that is important to take into consideration

Incentivized

It's free, right? I'll keep using the free version. So the real question to ask is this? Will I pay $999 for the Personal version or $1,999 for the Professional? Yikes! That is a big stretch. I'm not sure about that. The product comparison chart is at: http://www.tableausoftware.com/public/comparison

It is not ideal and requires time and dedication to understand how to work with it. Also, it has a lot of limitations around data it can accept. But in most cases, this tool is sufficient for everyday tasks of product and marketing departments. I wouldn't say that the interface is very user-friendly, but for people who regularly work with analytical tools, it must be ok.

Incentivized

Tableau public is a great training tool to understand the basics of Tableau before buying it. A great tool to extend Excel's visualization and to publish data for others. Not useful for anything you need secure. No ability to access databases. Static information only.

I give it a lower support rating because it seems like our Dev team hasn't gotten the support they need to set up our database to connect. Seems like we hit a roadblock and the project got put on pause for dev. That sucks for me because it is harder to get the dev team to focus on it if they don't get the help they need to set it up.

Incentivized

I have not yet required to contact support as the documentation and help i found online has always worked so far

Incentivized

I found it sufficient, and fast. I could easily "kick the tires" with Tableau on my data so I got up and running fast.

Start at the end and work backward. Identify the business case / issue and questions the end users have, then identify the data needed, and where to get it.

Incentivized

Looker Studio is far easier to implement, stand up, and learn. The interface is simpler and user-friendly for various levels of data visualization/analysis knowledge and experience. The biggest benefit of Looker Studio, however, is its ease of connection to GA data and speed. Furthermore, since it is an online program/tool, it requires less CPU/battery/storage on the user's device.

Incentivized

Tableau public is Free and no subscription is required whereas Tableau Desktop is a paid subscription. if there is no private or confidential data it's easy to Tableau public and share reports with people. Tableau public has same features and options same as desktop. its easy for students or beginners to signup and start learning/build reports.

• Free, so the only investment is time
• Because it doesn't have native support of non-Google sources, it can cost more money than Tableau
• The time spent formatting the templates or building connectors can have a negative impact on ROI
• As a agency, charging for the reporting service is profitable after the first month or two after building the dashboard.

Incentivized

• We have saved costs on Dashboarding tools thanks to the free tools within Tableau Public
• Streamlined reporting
• Time saved with easier data preparation features
• Professional looking dashboards and visualisations

Incentivized