Grafana vs. Looker Studio

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Grafana
Score 8.6 out of 10
N/A
Grafana is a data visualization tool developed by Grafana Labs in New York. It is available open source, managed (Grafana Cloud), or via an enterprise edition with enhanced features. Grafana has pluggable data source model and comes bundled with support for popular time series databases like Graphite. It also has built-in support for cloud monitoring vendors like Amazon Cloudwatch, Microsoft Azure and SQL databases like MySQL. Grafana can combine data from many places into a single dashboard.
$0
Looker Studio
Score 8.1 out of 10
N/A
Looker Studio is a data visualization platform that transforms data into meaningful presentations and dashboards with customized reporting tools.
$9
per month per user per project
Pricing
GrafanaLooker Studio
Editions & Modules
Grafana Cloud - Pro
$8
per month up to 1 active user
Grafana Cloud - Free
Free
10k metrics + 50GB logs + 50GB traces up to 3 active users
Grafana Cloud - Advanced
Volume Discounts
custom data usage custom active users
Grafana - Enterprise Stack
Custom Pricing
Looker Studio Pro
$9
per month per user per project
Looker Studio
No charge
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
GrafanaLooker Studio
Free Trial
YesNo
Free/Freemium Version
YesYes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
GrafanaLooker Studio
Features
GrafanaLooker Studio
BI Standard Reporting
Comparison of BI Standard Reporting features of Product A and Product B
Grafana
8.3
7 Ratings
3% above category average
Looker Studio
7.1
62 Ratings
13% below category average
Pixel Perfect reports7.97 Ratings6.743 Ratings
Customizable dashboards8.57 Ratings7.461 Ratings
Report Formatting Templates8.47 Ratings7.359 Ratings
Ad-hoc Reporting
Comparison of Ad-hoc Reporting features of Product A and Product B
Grafana
8.0
6 Ratings
3% above category average
Looker Studio
7.7
61 Ratings
1% below category average
Drill-down analysis7.96 Ratings7.251 Ratings
Formatting capabilities8.46 Ratings7.257 Ratings
Integration with R or other statistical packages7.76 Ratings6.929 Ratings
Report sharing and collaboration8.05 Ratings9.759 Ratings
Report Output and Scheduling
Comparison of Report Output and Scheduling features of Product A and Product B
Grafana
8.4
6 Ratings
3% above category average
Looker Studio
8.2
60 Ratings
0% above category average
Publish to Web8.16 Ratings8.353 Ratings
Publish to PDF8.66 Ratings8.853 Ratings
Report Versioning8.26 Ratings8.139 Ratings
Report Delivery Scheduling8.46 Ratings7.942 Ratings
Delivery to Remote Servers8.66 Ratings7.624 Ratings
Data Discovery and Visualization
Comparison of Data Discovery and Visualization features of Product A and Product B
Grafana
8.6
6 Ratings
10% above category average
Looker Studio
6.6
60 Ratings
16% below category average
Pre-built visualization formats (heatmaps, scatter plots etc.)8.66 Ratings7.460 Ratings
Location Analytics / Geographic Visualization9.06 Ratings7.857 Ratings
Predictive Analytics8.56 Ratings5.230 Ratings
Pattern Recognition and Data Mining8.34 Ratings6.06 Ratings
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GrafanaLooker Studio
Small Businesses
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Score 9.8 out of 10
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Score 9.8 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
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Score 9.8 out of 10
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Score 9.8 out of 10
Enterprises
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Score 7.2 out of 10
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User Ratings
GrafanaLooker Studio
Likelihood to Recommend
9.4
(7 ratings)
8.7
(56 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
-
(0 ratings)
9.0
(1 ratings)
Usability
9.6
(3 ratings)
8.5
(7 ratings)
Support Rating
-
(0 ratings)
6.7
(10 ratings)
User Testimonials
GrafanaLooker Studio
Likelihood to Recommend
Grafana Labs
Just about any organization with more than one server and more than one cluster as it scales very well. Configuration of the application takes time and finesse to fine tune to where the balance of load time and getting data quickly meets. The plugins add load time but fine tuning for the application to meet demand needs nailed down at implementation
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Google
Visualizing cross-channel campaign performance can blend data from a few different sources to compare performance metrics like spend, clicks, and conversions side-by-side in a single view, which helps in quick budget reallocation decisions. When dealing with massive volumes of data (millions of rows) or highly complex queries, Looker Studio dashboards can become slow, laggy, or even crash. Performance issues are a frequent complaint when working with large datasets, making it unsuitable for enterprise-level companies
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Pros
Grafana Labs
  • Alerting through many different medium as Slack, Email, Webhook etc
  • Beautiful and unlimited number of dashboards to view your metrics and tweak them as you please
  • Log aggregation and powerful Logql to filter and view your logs
  • Microservices monitoring
  • Large number of plugins and data sources to collect your metrics from almost anywhere
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Google
  • Breath of data - the number of ways to interrogate the data is endless, and the options to view metrics alongside each other make for comprehensive datasets.
  • Data visualisation and customisation - the options for presenting data and separating out across pages allow for clean visuals and segmented information.
  • Easy shareability/usability - a quick and simple tool to introduce colleagues to, and easy to grant access for them to be able to view the data, without having to understand the setup itself.
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Cons
Grafana Labs
  • There are some settings which we can't configure from UI (Web Console).
  • We've open[ed] up configuration files in command line text editors and manually do the settings e.g. LDAP/SSO configuration.
  • In terms of visualization, it's best, but it doesn't support log analysis otherwise it could destroy business of all other visualization tools.
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Google
  • It needs better handling of complex logic. We often need workarounds to perform complex custom calculations, and it can be really unpleasant at times.
  • Felt it got slow with a larger data set, and in one minor report, we had to set up time filters so that calculations during spikes could be traced more quickly.
  • Compare to competition they need to improve with notification things.
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Likelihood to Renew
Grafana Labs
No answers on this topic
Google
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
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Usability
Grafana Labs
It is infinitely flexible. If you can imagine it, Grafana can almost certainly do it. Usability may be in the eye of the beholder however, as there is time needed to curate the experience and get the dashboards customized to how it makes sense to you. I know one thing they are working on are more templates, based on data sources
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Google
Looker Studio is easy to use, and it offers a sufficient variety of predefined visualizations to choose from. It's easy for us, and anyone can set up basic reporting without extensive data visualization skills. The interface layout is easy to understand, and it doesn't take long to get used to.
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Support Rating
Grafana Labs
No answers on this topic
Google
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.
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Alternatives Considered
Grafana Labs
Grafana blows Nagios out of the water when it comes to customization. The ability to feed almost any data source makes it very versatile and the cost is great.
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Google
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.
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Return on Investment
Grafana Labs
  • Grafana has replaced many higher priced tools
  • The integrations are seemless with multiple backends
  • Combining graphs and dashboards from multiple data sources is a game changer
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Google
  • 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.
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ScreenShots