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Looker Studio vs SAS Visual Analytics comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

Looker Studio
Average Rating
7.6
Reviews Sentiment
5.4
Number of Reviews
16
Ranking in other categories
Reporting (11th)
SAS Visual Analytics
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
40
Ranking in other categories
Data Visualization (12th)
 

Mindshare comparison

While both are Business Intelligence solutions, they serve different purposes. Looker Studio is designed for Reporting and holds a mindshare of 2.5%, up 2.5% compared to last year.
SAS Visual Analytics, on the other hand, focuses on Data Visualization, holds 1.7% mindshare, down 4.4% since last year.
Reporting Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Looker Studio2.5%
Microsoft Power BI15.3%
Tableau Enterprise15.1%
Other67.1%
Reporting
Data Visualization Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
SAS Visual Analytics1.7%
Tableau Enterprise9.8%
Qlik Sense4.9%
Other83.6%
Data Visualization
 

Featured Reviews

Heron Ziegel - PeerSpot reviewer
Project Engineer at Quartz Consulting Group
Has supported quick dashboard creation and data sharing but lacks tools for managing multiple reports efficiently
We integrated Looker Studio with other platforms in our data ecosystem; we tried integrating with Sheets, and that went okay, but it could have been better. It could have been better because it needed a very specific format to read the data, so we had to reformat the sheet file. Looker Studio was mostly just helpful in that it provided live updating charts for tracking performance indicators in the organization. Integrating with a database was very difficult because there wasn't a lot of feedback for what was going wrong with the connection. I don't remember if we reached out to support. I didn't personally reach out, but my boss may have. I didn't reach out to support, so I do not have experience with it to rate it. We worked with the free version of Looker Studio initially, and we upgraded at some point to the pro version; I don't remember if we actually paid for it or if it was just a free trial. The pricing was reasonable. I remember doing a price comparison, and it was pretty reasonable, but it did have fewer features than a lot of other software, which was okay for a comparable price but a little cheaper.
AN
Senior Manager: ICT Compliance at DEPARTMENT OF PUBLIC SERVICE AND ADMINISTRATION
Enables effective data management and reporting with a straightforward setup
SAS Visual Analytics is helpful as it allows us to perform any queries we need. The ability to query information from our Excel data into SAS to view specific data is invaluable. In terms of reporting, it is easy to extract quick reports and provides graphical representations of the data, which is a great feature.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"Data Studio integrates seamlessly with other Google products, and we can use it with other APIs if we like."
"The company dashboard is useful because we could share it via a link as a reminder for everyone to check it weekly. We observed the progress of our portfolio from last week to the current week, allowing us to compare revenues."
"Valuable features include advanced integrated analysis and easy implementation."
"The ability to integrate with a great variety of data sources."
"This has improved our organization by allowing people to see their data and develop visualizations themselves."
"The product's initial setup phase is very simple."
"I find it favorable regarding speed of development, ease of building, and flexibility."
"Looker's ability to perform aggregation before visualization allows for effective data slicing and dicing."
"Exposure of full population transactional data to customer facing roles with ability to analyse trends and patterns empowers our citizen data scientists to answer their own business questions regarding customer trends and to forecast future trends."
"Go ahead and do it! It’s the best tool for insightful and analytical dashboard development and reporting."
"I use Visual Analytics for enterprise reporting."
"Overall, I think SAS VA is a great software for interactive reporting, as it is very user friendly and allows people with no statistical or computing background to learn quickly to analyse data across the company."
"Since it is simply drag and drop it makes data inspection easy."
"It's quite easy to learn and to progress with SAS from an end-user perspective."
"I believe that the possibilities for exploring data and formulating visual results are quite good because it allows the business analyst to have different perspectives on the data."
"Visual Analytics is very easy to use. I use Visual Analytics for all the typical use cases except text mining. I used it to analyze data and monitor statistics, not text mining. I also use it for data visualization as well as creating interactive dashboards and infographics."
 

Cons

"Looker Studio did not fit our needs for scalability."
"From the perspective of infrastructure, I cannot provide a valuable opinion on the ease of use and customization options of Looker Studio."
"There is a significant degree of sophistication required to compete with Tableau or Cognos."
"The tool should improve on live data integration for quicker data reflection."
"Stability and scalability an be improved for a full ten."
"There are issues with integration and I encountered limits and warnings, especially with my pivot table size."
"It's not yet a replacement for a complete BI tool."
"The challenges with Google Data Studio are associated with the security part, making it an area where improvements are required."
"It is not as mature as competitors such as Tableau and QlikView."
"If there could be 100% feasibility of forecasting feature available then we could be more accurate as it's currently 95%."
"The charts and tables could use better sorting, primarily using other variables than the ones on the figure."
"Colours used on report objects"
"There is a need for coding when it comes to digital reporting which can be intimidating."
"The integration aspects of the solution could be improved."
"It is expensive. This is BI at the the high end."
"The product as used was a little unintuitive and required some workarounds for tasks that should have been easy e.g. automating a query for populating a data table."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"I think the tool is cheap because you don't need to pay anything for using the tool. However, when connecting and analyzing other data sources, you should consider where to analyze this information because Google Data Studio doesn't handle much data well. You must also consider how you will connect this data to it. In this case, you might need to hire DevOps or a data team to help with these issues."
"The solution is free but the Google Looker is expensive."
"The tool is free."
"The cost is quite affordable based on feature analysis."
"The product is available for free."
"It's approximately $114,000 US dollars per year."
"I work with the tool's free version...The tool's corporate version is very expensive and requires a monthly hire."
"SAS Visual Analytics is expensive, as is the rest of the platform."
"$10,000 per annum for an enterprise license."
"The product is expensive."
"The cost of the solution can be expensive. There is an additional cost for users."
"The product is quite expensive."
"It was licensed for corporate use, and its licensing was on a yearly basis."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
10%
Computer Software Company
10%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Retailer
7%
Financial Services Firm
15%
Government
10%
Construction Company
8%
University
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business7
Midsize Enterprise3
Large Enterprise6
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business13
Midsize Enterprise8
Large Enterprise19
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Google Data Studio?
The company dashboard is useful because we could share it via a link as a reminder for everyone to check it weekly. We observed the progress of our portfolio from last week to the current week, all...
What needs improvement with Google Data Studio?
I would appreciate improvements in the data modeling features, as it's not straightforward, and it's not what people in analytics are used to. Specifically, most people using this visualization too...
What is your primary use case for Google Data Studio?
I used Looker Studio mainly for reporting, where I created multiple dashboards on it. I wouldn't say I made the most of the usage of the connections because all the connections were based on flat f...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for SAS Visual Analytics?
It's about an average of five. It's easy to scale, but it comes with cost.
What needs improvement with SAS Visual Analytics?
In terms of configuration, I would like to see AI capabilities since many applications are now integrating AI. It may be that our current subscription does not include AI-enabled features, but I wo...
What is your primary use case for SAS Visual Analytics?
I started to work with SAS Visual Analytics ( /products/sas-visual-analytics-reviews ) in 2015. We use it for analysis on ICT expenditure information and ICT personnel information. The analytics ar...
 

Also Known As

Data Studio
SAS BI
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Genesys, Shueisha
Staples, Ausgrid, Scotiabank, the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, the Blue Cross and Blue Shield of North Carolina, Oklahoma Gas & Electric, Xcel Energy, and Triad Analytics Solutions.
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