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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

"I find it favorable regarding speed of development, ease of building, and flexibility."
"What I appreciate about Looker Studio is mostly the clean visuals, which is good, as I prefer a dashboard with a clean aesthetic rather than feeling sort of an old Windows type of dashboard."
"This solution is a powerful way to have several tools integrated at one location and convert data into beautiful reports that can be easily edited and viewed."
"Looker's ability to perform aggregation before visualization allows for effective data slicing and dicing."
"The product's initial setup phase is very simple."
"The ability to integrate with a great variety of data sources."
"I would rate this solution eight or nine out of ten."
"The most valuable features of this solution are its ease of use and the plethora of query sources."
"It's a stable, reliable product."
"Data handling is one of the best features of SAS Visual Analytics."
"Great for handling complex data models."
"SAS Visual Analytics is an excellent platform; the user interface is good, it has a good look and feel, it is simple to use, it integrates well with SAS making it simple and quick for developers, does not require a high level of skill but rather a medium level, and it is very easy and fast to learn so that people who don't know the product can work in a very autonomous manner after one week."
"R, however, has very potent display capabilities and numerous packages with advanced functionality."
"We have detected a high margin group of customers with very little work."
"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."
"The speed to display charts and react to users' choices is great."
 

Cons

"From the perspective of infrastructure, I cannot provide a valuable opinion on the ease of use and customization options of Looker Studio."
"It's not yet a replacement for a complete BI tool."
"Panels are not as easy to use as other data extraction UIs."
"There is a significant degree of sophistication required to compete with Tableau or Cognos."
"When you physically install a product on one machine instead of the cloud, you have a better visibility, best icon quality, etc.. It's more of an issue with how we are adapting to the transition."
"Looker Studio did not fit our needs for scalability."
"Insisting on forums, blogs and community outreach in communications, and posting videos on an established calendar would be useful."
"The tool has a lot of room for improvement. It's not very professional and allows for only simple tasks like indicating KPIs or quick calculations. It lacks a good calculation-based language like Power BI's DAX, making it less suitable for professional use. Additionally, the variety of visualization tools is limited, and customization options are restricted."
"The charts and tables could use better sorting, primarily using other variables than the ones on the figure. If they could implement views like in the older version (previous to Viya), it would be very nice."
"SAS Visual Analytics could improve by making it more accessible for users outside the organization."
"The solution is a little weak at the front end."
"There are a lot of technicalities in setting up the product."
"There are a few little things that are predefined and can be done out of the box immediately. There is no business intelligence application that is predefined, which is something some customers or prospects would love to have. Small and mid-sized companies would struggle with it because they prefer something standard that has been predefined by somebody else."
"It will be better if SAS can accommodate survey data as some organisations would like to load their survey results and analyse in SAS."
"There are scalability issues. It depends on the data volume and number of end-users. VA requires a lot of hardware resources to move volumes of data."
"The licensing ends up being more expensive than other options."
 

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 tool is free."
"The product is available for free."
"The cost is quite affordable based on feature analysis."
"The solution is free but the Google Looker is expensive."
"It was licensed for corporate use, and its licensing was on a yearly basis."
"Licensing is simple."
"$10,000 per annum for an enterprise license."
"SAS Visual Analytics is expensive, as is the rest of the platform."
"It's approximately $114,000 US dollars per year."
"The product is expensive."
"The product is quite expensive."
"The cost of the solution can be expensive. There is an additional cost for users."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
10%
Computer Software Company
10%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Comms Service Provider
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.
Find out what your peers are saying about Microsoft, Salesforce, IBM and others in Reporting. Updated: March 2026.
887,041 professionals have used our research since 2012.