Top 3 Looker Studio Alternatives and Competitors

To get accurate insights into your marketing efforts, gathering all your data in one place and merging it is essential. Utilizing specialized software can help you easily analyze and optimize your marketing performance, but only if you make a wise choice.

In this article, we review Looker, its features and benefits, pros and cons, and compare it to three popular alternatives: OWOX BI, Power BI, and Tableau.

Looker is a business intelligence and analytics platform that allows you to collect and store data from different sources in an automatically generated LookML model. To use Looker efficiently, you must first learn how the basic LookML model works. With Looker, you can configure alerts, visualizations, and dashboards. On top of that, with Looker’s built-in code editor, you can adjust automatically generated models if needed.

Looker is suitable for companies in the e-commerce, retail, SaaS, media, and gaming industries.

With Looker, you can:

• Embed insights with Salesforce, SharePoint, Confluence, PowerPoint, and other tools
• Accelerate analytics using prebuilt code in Looker Blocks
• Integrate Looker with Google Sheets
• Visualize reports
  • Build interactive dashboards
  • Access a dashboard template library

Looker (Google Cloud core) pricing consists of two primary components:

1. Platform Pricing: This encompasses the expenses associated with running a Looker (Google Cloud core) instance, encompassing platform administration, integrations, and semantic modeling capabilities.

2. User Pricing: This entails the fees for licensing individual users to access the Looker platform. These charges can vary based on the user type and their permissions within the Looker (Google Cloud core) platform.

Each instance of Looker (Google Cloud core) you create is linked to a billing account. Any costs incurred when setting up a new instance or adding named users to it will be invoiced to the associated billing account.

• The platform cost starts from $5,000/month. 
• The Viewer User Plan costs $30 per user per month
• The Standard User costs $60 per user per month
• The Developer User costs $125 per user per month

A detailed list of Looker (Google Cloud core) platform features and user entitlements can be found in the documentation.

Looker has custom pricing that depends on your specific case, number of users, and scale of the deployment.

Looker, which is now a part of Google Cloud, offers a wide range of integrations to connect with various data sources, tools, and platforms, such as:

OWOX BI is a comprehensive analytics platform that covers everything from data collection and streaming to attribution modeling and reporting. With OWOX BI, companies get a complete view of their marketing activities across various channels, empowering advertising specialists to optimize their ad spending and achieve better ROI.​​OWOX BI offers three powerful solutions for data management and analysis:

OWOX BI Pipelines facilitates seamless data collection from various advertising platforms, CRMs, and website builders, enabling organizations to consolidate all their data in one place in order to have a data source of truth and gain better insights.

OWOX BI Streaming is a cookieless real-time user behavior tracking system, ensuring privacy compliance with regulation and extending the lifespan of cookies. Marketers can accurately track the entire conversion journey, find the true sources of conversions, and gain a deeper understanding of customer behavior.

OWOX BI Transformation saves time on data preparation (average of 70 hours per month). With pre-built low- or no-code transformation templates (based on 100’s delivered projects across multiple industries), businesses can quickly produce trusted datasets for reporting, modeling, and operational workflows.

Lastly, OWOX BI integrates with visualization tools like Looker Studio, Tableau, or Power BI, enhancing data-driven decision-making by building customizable reports & keeping the data always up-to-date.

OWOX BI is the perfect solution for ecommerce, retail, telecom, finance, and lead generation companies.

With OWOX BI, you can:

• Import data from advertising and marketing services to BigQuery or Google Analytics 4:
  • Transfer historical data
  • Automatically update ad data within the 21-day data actualization period
  • Automatically parse the appropriate UTM tags
  • Convert costs into one currency
  • Automatically apply corresponding changes to the product if an ad service API changes
  • Update data retroactively if it’s updated in a third-party ad service
• Find the true acquisition sources of conversions:
  
• • Collect raw data on user behavior in a convenient GAU or GA4 structure;
  • Recognize dynamic parameters in UTM tags, , and monitor the relevance of information
    
  • Import data from your CRM system, call tracking system, and other services
  • Collect personal user information (emails and phone numbers)
• Visualize data
• Use our templates to build reports in Looker Studio or Google Sheets;
• Integrate with other visualization tools (Qlik, Microsoft Power BI, Tableau etc.)
• Prepare data for reporting with a simple built-in report builder (no SQL knowledge required)
• Easily monitor data quality and highlight mistakes

Check out OWOX BI pricing or start using OWOX BI with a free trial period.

Alternatively, you can book a free demo and we’ll discuss your use case and calculate a custom price.

You can get a plan that suits your business objectives and goals.

Integrations

OWOX BI offers 100+ integrations with various services:

With OWOX BI you can easily extract, seamlessly transform, merge & load your data from ads providers or business apps to data warehouses, spreadsheets, or data visualization tools in just a few clicks. Choose from pre-built data pipelines or request a custom connector.

Tableau is an analytics platform that uses machine learning to collect and visualize your data. With the help of drag-and-drop functionality, you can build interactive visualizations. Tableau is partially based on the VizQL query language, which translates dashboard and visualization components into queries so you don’t have to optimize the work of the service manually.

Tableau is suitable for companies in the enterprise, retail, media, finance, and other industries.

With Tableau, you can:

• Integrate your own security protocols
• Visualize data
  • Create interactive visualizations
  • Share visualizations with your colleagues
• Use the Tableau mobile app
• Take advantage of role-based licensing to provide access for all your teammates

Tableau offers a range of pricing options to cater to various data needs. The pricing is divided into three main user categories:

1. Tableau Creator: Priced at $75 per user per month when billed annually, Tableau Creator is essential for any deployment and includes access to Tableau Desktop, Tableau Prep Builder, and one Creator license on Tableau Cloud.

2. Tableau Explorer: At $42 per user per month when billed annually, Tableau Explorer enables users to explore trusted data and perform self-service analytics, including one Explorer license on Tableau Cloud.

3. Tableau Viewer: Available at $15 per user per month when billed annually, Tableau Viewer allows users to view and interact with dashboards and visualizations in a secure platform, with one Viewer license on Tableau Cloud.

Each of these user types comes with various capabilities, including data management, interaction with visualizations, collaboration, authoring, and data preparation.

Tableau offers flexible connectivity, integration, and extensibility for data analytics. Native data connectors enable access to various data sources, including databases, spreadsheets, big data, and cloud data. Data Cloud for Tableau simplifies customer data integration. 

Tableau's partner ecosystem supports data pipeline infrastructure, from storage to analytics. Extensibility allows the integration of statistical models and other applications into Tableau dashboards, making powerful analysis accessible. Embedded analytics lets you integrate Tableau into custom portals and applications. 

Tableau provides tools for deployment and customization while offering academic programs for free access to its software for students and instructors.

Microsoft Power BI is visualization and reporting software that allows you to collect and visualize data, create custom reports, and share them with your teammates. Since Power BI tool works with Microsoft technology, you can take advantage of its familiar interface to start building business analytics visualizations easily.

Power BI is suitable for companies in the enterprise, retail, healthcare, and other industries.

With Power BI, you can:

• Visualize reports
  • Create interactive visualizations
  • Use a library of ready-made visualizations
• Use desktop and mobile apps for Android, iOS, and Windows Mobile and collaborate with your colleagues
• Embed analytics and interactive reports into your applications
• Use an Azure data lake for high volumes of information to accelerate processing

Power BI, Microsoft's analytics tool, offers various pricing options:

1. Power BI Free: Included in Microsoft Fabric Preview, it enables the creation of interactive reports for free. Upgrading to Pro or Premium is required for sharing.

2. Power BI Pro: Priced at $10 per user per month, it provides self-service analytics for publishing and viewing reports across your organization. Included in Microsoft 365 E5.

3. Power BI Premium: Priced at $20 per user per month, it offers larger model sizes, frequent refreshes, and enterprise-scale features in addition to Pro features.

4. Power BI Premium per Capacity: Starting from $4,995 per capacity per month, it allows content consumption without additional user licenses. Includes Microsoft Fabric.

5. Power BI Premium per Capacity (Fabric SKUs): Starting from $262.80 per capacity per month, it provides access to Microsoft Fabric and pay-as-you-go pricing.

Pricing may vary by factors like currency and region. Academic, government and nonprofit pricing options are also available.

Power BI offers 120+ connectors to various business services like Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics, and Microsoft Excel.

After authentication, Power BI creates a workspace with a dashboard and reports showcasing data insights. Users can customize these and distribute them within their organization. The data refreshes daily, and custom dashboards can be created in Power BI Desktop for more specific needs. Troubleshooting options are available for connection issues, and users can suggest services for integration. Template apps can also be created and shared