Power BI vs Google Data Studio. Which One Will Fulfill Your Business Needs?

Microsoft Power Bi vs Google Data studio – Which one is better? This has been a raging debate since the release of Google data analysis tool. Before we look into which one is right for your business, we should understand how they can be immensely useful for your business decisions, once set up correctly.

Data analysis takes into account the historical and present information and provides future growth predictions for the business based on the available data. Business Intelligence (BI) as a speciality comprises of tools and expertise to carry out such data analysis. BI can help you filter out useful data from stored unprocessed data in your organization’s backend. The analyzed data can be used to make informed business decisions.

There are several tools that can help you with Business Intelligence (BI). There is Microsoft Power BI, Google Data Studio and Tableau to name a few. The main work of BI tools is to present the raw and unprocessed data in the readable form that is visually understandable. Hence, these tools are also known as data visualization tools.

These data visualization tools add more importance to numeric data, which makes it easier to take operational or strategic decisions related to any business. The options between two giants like Google and Microsoft makes it difficult to choose one tool for our business. So, to help you make a choice, we have compared Power BI and Google Data Studio.

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Microsoft Power BI vs Google Data Studio

There are many similarities and differences between these two analysis tools. Both of these are used to prepare reports and display them in an easy to assimilate format. Now, let’s see what makes them different from each other.

What is Microsoft Power BI?

Power BI is a data visualization tool. It comprises services, applications, data connectors, and API that comes together to form reports from different forms of data. The reports are in the form of charts and graphs, which makes it readable and visually pleasing. This readable data can be shared across organizations and can also be embedded in websites and apps.

MS Power BI lets you give an insight into the business to clients. Power BI consists of 3 main parts.

• Power BI Desktop – used to create reports and customize dashboards
• Power BI Service – used to view created reports and dashboards
• Power BI mobile apps – used to view by sales employee or concerned person to view the progress of specific reports

With Power BI, you can schedule a specific time to generate reports and also have a time set to get the email about refreshed data. You can use Power BI APIs to embed reports, data, and dashboards in custom applications.

If your organization doesn’t have a cloud to store and share the reports, then you can use Power BI Report Server. The Power BI Report Server is deployed behind the company’s firewall. You can share and view the reports from there. It also gives you an option to migrate to the cloud because of its compatibility with Power BI in the cloud whenever you wish.

Available Data Sources in Power BI

Power BI supports the majority of data sets from different sources. The main data sources for Power BI include-

• Flat Files (unstructured/unrelated data)
• SQL Database
• Azure Cloud platform
• OData Feed
• Blank Query
• Online Services
• Other data sources such as Hadoop, Exchange, or Active Directory

Pros

• Can process more than 5 excel sheets at once and give you a piece of understandable information from it
• Can work on unstructured data as well
• Can schedule reports refresh and get an email for the same at the scheduled time
• Collect data from different data sources
• Provides better data visualization
• Have a mobile app to access the records from anywhere
• Easy to use for people familiar with the Microsoft Office environment, especially Power Query and Excel users

Cons

• High learning curve
• Difficult to pull data from Google Suite data sources like Google ads (need connectors like SuperMetrics)

Microsoft Power BI Pricing:

It comes with a 60 day trial.

Power BI Pro is priced at USD 9.99/month for single user and Power BI Premium is USD 4995/month for dedicated cloud computing, and is aimed towards enterprises. 

Who Should Use Microsoft Power BI?

The businesses which have a ton of raw data to process and do not primarily work with Google Suite should opt for Power BI. If you have people who are power users of Microsoft Excel, then incorporating Power BI in your business will be relatively easy.

Power BI also gives the company an option to store up to 10 TB of data with its premium version. So, the organizations which require to process and store such large data can opt for Power BI. Power BI is the best option when it comes to visualizing the correlation between unrelated data and get it in the simplified form of visuals.

What is the Google Data Studio?

Google Data Studio is a similar data visualization tool which is a part of Google Analytics Solutions. It has a web interface to pull in your data and make it readable with charts and reports. You can easily pull data from Google Suite like Google Adwords, and Sheets. Making any report in Google Data Studio is fairly straightforward, especially if the data source is Google Suite.

Google Data Studio allows you to schedule a time to create a report and download it in a PDF form. One can easily get on board with this data visualization tool if he/she is familiar with products from Google Suite. With Google Data Studio, you don’t get a mobile or desktop application. You need to use its Web interface to make reports and charts.

Pulling the data from other data sources except Google Suite requires data connectors, which comes with a price. The data visualization is not as good as Power BI; hence the complicated or unrelated data cannot be visualized in a better way.

The dashboard is simple to use; however, it cannot be customized. As Google Data Studio is new and free, it lacks some of the functionality present in Power BI.

If a business has a ton of data to process, you might need to make use of Google BigQuery, which again needs specific expertise.

Available Data Sources in Google Data Studio

You can use external connectors to import data from third-party sources. There are many data sources available in the Google Data Studio. The most famous once are-

• Google Analytics
• Google Ads
• Google Search Console
• BigQuery
• YouTube Analytics
• PostgreSQL
• Google Fit
• Stack Overflow
• Github
• Search Ads 360
• Display & Video 360

Pros

• Easy to use and understand
• Low learning curve
• Completely free
• Can easily import data from Google Suite
• Schedule the reports at the required time

Cons

• No desktop or mobile app available
• Cannot create reports and charts of unrelated data
• Pulling data from third-party data sources can create issues
• Large data processing and connectors cost money

Google Data Studio Pricing – Free

Who Should Use Google Data Studio?

The startup business who don’t wish to spend on reports and data analysis can opt for Google Data Studio. The company that needs to analyze data from Google Suite services like Google Ads and Sheets can also use Google Data Studio.

Google Data Studio can also be used by people who want hands-on experience in data analysis and visualization tools.

Table of Comparison

Note: I have added table for simple points (they are covered in the above sections as well), it can be removed if not required

Android – yesWindows – yesNo

In Conclusion

Based on our comparison of PowerBi vs Google Data Studio we can easily conclude that the choice of the data visualization tool is a company or organization specific choice. If your business is inclined towards Google Suite, then you need to opt for Google Data Studio. The data present in Google ads, sheets, and other Google Suite are structured and clean. This makes it possible to visualize it using Google Data Studio.

On the other hand, if you are a big enterprise that has the countless number of Excel sheets with raw, unorganized, and unprocessed data, then you need to go for Microsoft Power BI. You can correlate and visualize the unrelated data with Power BI in a better way.

Acquiscent specializes in Power BI Development. Get in touch to know more about our services.