Reporting & Dashboards
Serious business intelligence at an SME-affordable per-seat price
Looker Studio
Free dashboards with the sharing model of a Google Doc
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Best for: SMEs and marketing teams reporting on Google-ecosystem data (Analytics, Ads, Search Console, Sheets) that want shareable dashboards at zero licence cost.
Looker Studio (formerly Google Data Studio) is the 'start here' answer in SME reporting, for one overriding reason: the free tier is the product. No seat fees, no expiry, no watermarks — a real dashboard tool with native connectors for Google Analytics, Google Ads, Search Console and Sheets, and a sharing model that works exactly like a Google Doc: send a link, set view or edit rights, done. For marketing reporting in particular, most SMEs need nothing more.
The paid tier, Looker Studio Pro, is $9 per user per project per month (verified Aug 2026) — and note the unit carefully: 'project' means a Google Cloud project, not your organisation, which makes Pro pricing awkward to reason about for agencies managing many clients. Pro adds team content management, Google Cloud support and the arriving Gemini assistance (formula help, narrative insights); the free tier gets none of that but loses remarkably little of the core product.
The limits are equally clear. Data modelling is shallow next to Power BI — blended sources and calculated fields will carry you a long way, but there is no semantic model, and complex transformations belong upstream in a warehouse or a spreadsheet. And while Google-source connectors are free and native, most non-Google connectors come from third parties (Supermetrics and similar) at subscription prices that can quietly exceed the cost of a paid BI tool — budget them honestly before declaring Looker Studio 'free' for a mixed-source stack.
This profile reflects documented capabilities and our use of Looker Studio for client marketing dashboards; hands-on evaluation of the Gemini features in Pro is pending.
Pricing
| Plan | Price | Includes |
|---|---|---|
| Free | Free | The full core product — no seat fees, no expiry (verified Aug 2026) |
| Looker Studio Pro | $9 per user/project/month | Team content management, Cloud support, Gemini features; billed per Google Cloud project — 30-day trial (verified Aug 2026) |
| Third-party connectors (optional) | Custom | Non-Google sources mostly need paid partner connectors (Supermetrics class) — the hidden line item in a "free" stack |
Key features
- Native Google connectors — Analytics, Ads, Search Console, Sheets, BigQuery — free and first-party
- Google Doc-style sharing — Link sharing with view/edit rights; no viewer licences
- Blended data sources — Join sources in-report for simple cross-channel views
- Calculated fields — Formula-level transformation without a warehouse
- Scheduled delivery — Email dashboards on a cadence to stakeholders
- Report templates — A large gallery of community and partner templates
Pros and cons
What we like
- Genuinely free — the core product, not a trial
- Easiest sharing model in the category
- First-party connectors for the whole Google stack
- Zero-install, browser-based, familiar to anyone who uses Google tools
What could be better
- Shallow data modelling next to Power BI
- Non-Google connectors are mostly paid third-party subscriptions
- Pro’s per-project billing is awkward for agencies