Free is the best thing about Data Studio. It is also the only thing it cannot charge you for.
Pricing and features checked 15 August 2026 · Sources listed at the foot of the page
First, the name
On 16 April 2026, Google renamed Looker Studio back to Data Studio
The product moved to datastudio.google.com, the help centre relocated, and the old addresses redirect. Google’s documentation says existing reports, data sources and users carried over with no action required, and as far as we can tell that is true. We have kept this page at its old address because “Looker Studio” is still what agencies search for — but if a comparison page you are reading elsewhere still calls it Looker Studio throughout, that tells you when it was last checked.
Sources 1 and 2 · Everything on this page checked 15 August 2026
The short answer
When Data Studio is the right call, and when it is not
Data Studio is used by more agencies than every paid tool on this site combined, and mostly for a very good reason. Here is the honest split.
Stay on Data Studio if
- Your budget for reporting software is zero. Nothing here beats free, and free at any number of reports and viewers is a genuinely rare thing.
- Your data lives in BigQuery. Data Studio's warehouse integration is the deepest of any tool in this category and we do not have an equivalent.
- Your clients do not care whose logo sits at the bottom of the report. Plenty do not, and if yours are among them the watermark costs you nothing.
- You need something unusual connected. About 1,400 partner connectors is an ecosystem no smaller vendor can match.
- You are the one person who builds all the reports, you enjoy the canvas, and the monthly maintenance is not somebody else's problem.
- You want a huge library of community templates and a decade of answered questions to search.
Move to Reports if
- You are selling a branded client experience. The Data Studio watermark on an embedded report cannot be removed at any price, and there is no custom domain.
- Your clients run Local Services Ads, Meta, Microsoft Advertising or LinkedIn. None of those has a Google-built connector, so all of them arrive through a partner's subscription and a partner's price list.
- You need the report to say when a figure is sampled, or modelled, rather than counted. That is the difference between a number and a number you can defend in a meeting.
- You want a report sent on a schedule with a written summary, from your own address, rather than a PDF from Google once a day.
- You are tired of absorbing somebody else's breaking changes: four of them since December 2024, by Google's own labelling.
- You want paid search, SEO and site care as separate pages of one client report, each scoped to its own sources.
Side by side
Twenty-two rows, and the last five go to Google
Every claim about Data Studio below is taken from Google's own documentation or its own developer forum, quoted rather than paraphrased, and cited with the day we read it. Where a row is genuinely a tie, it says so.
| Capability | Reports | Data Studio |
|---|---|---|
| What it costs | ||
| The tool itselfSource 3 | $39.95 per client report a month, falling to $29.95 at ten and $19.95 at twenty-five. | Free. Genuinely, at any number of reports and viewers. |
| Meta, Microsoft Advertising, LinkedIn, TikTokSource 8Source 9Source 19Source 21No Google-built connector exists for any of them. A third-party partner connector is the only route. | Native connectors for Meta, Microsoft Advertising and LinkedIn, at no extra charge. | A partner connector subscription, priced by the partner — from about $24 a month, and $239 at twenty clients. |
| Being able to raise a support ticketSource 4Source 5 | Included. | Pro at $9 per user per project, plus a separate Google Cloud support plan from $29 a month. |
| A published uptime commitmentSource 4 | None published. We are a small vendor and will not pretend otherwise. | We could not find an SLA for Data Studio Pro in Google's terms. |
| Putting your name on it | ||
| Removing the vendor's watermarkSource 6Google's wording: “Embedded reports always contain the Data Studio watermark and full-screen option. You can't remove these.” | With the white label add-on, nothing on the page says our name. | Not possible, at any price. |
| Reports on your own domainSource 6 | Your domain, with certificates issued automatically on first request. | No custom domain option is documented. |
| Applying your brand to a reportSource 7 | Set once per agency, and overridable per client. Every report inherits it. | Rich theming — but “custom themes aren't shared across reports” and only one exists at a time. |
| Sending from your own addressSource 10 | Your sending name and address, with per-agency SMTP if you want it. | Scheduled delivery comes from Google. |
| Getting it to the client | ||
| Scheduled deliverySource 10 | Daily, weekly or monthly in the client's own timezone, with a written summary of the period. | PDF by email. One schedule per report and once a day on the free tier. |
| Sending it on the spotSource 10Source 1 | A Send now button on every schedule. | Send now moved behind Pro in March 2025. |
| A live link the client can open any timeSource 15 | Password protected, expiring, revocable, no account needed. | Share by link, and no Google account is needed to view. |
| PDF that survives a complex reportSource 11Source 16Source 17 | Print to PDF from the browser, with print styles that stack pages properly. | Documented failure modes: charts showing “System Error”, and complex reports timing out. |
| Whether the numbers can be trusted | ||
| Telling you when Analytics data is sampledSource 12Google's wording: “Data Studio doesn't indicate if data from Google Analytics is sampled.” | Figures come from the GA4 Data API and a stale cache is flagged to the viewer on the page. | No indication anywhere in the report. |
| Marking a projected figure as projected | Every modelled number carries a “modeled” badge and flips to live when real data lands. | Not a feature either way — projections are yours to build and to label. |
| Google Local Services AdsSource 8 | Native: leads, charged leads, calls, messages and bookings from the Google Ads API. | Not among the Google-built connectors. |
| Combining sourcesSource 14 | Sources are combined per report and per page, with formula metrics across them. | Blends of up to five tables, with all five join types but equality conditions only. |
| Hitting the Analytics API's limitsSource 13 | The same GA4 quotas apply to us; results are cached per query and range so a report is not re-fetched on every view. | Same quotas, surfaced as errors like “Exhausted concurrent requests quota”. |
| Where Data Studio is simply better | ||
| BigQuery and warehouse workSource 8 | Snowflake natively, BigQuery through the Windsor.ai bridge. | The deepest BigQuery integration of any tool, with BI Engine behind it. |
| Breadth of the connector ecosystemSource 8Our bridge is not free either: it runs on your own Windsor.ai API key, which is their subscription, not ours. We are not going to criticise a partner-connector bill and hide that we have a version of one. | 16 native connectors, plus a bridge Windsor.ai says reaches 350+ platforms. | About 1,400 partner connectors. Whatever it is, somebody has built it. |
| Templates and community | A built-in starter template set, and your own reports saved as templates. | An enormous public gallery, and a decade of community answers. |
| Design freedom on the canvasSource 7 | Twenty-one widget types on a twelve-column grid. | A free canvas: put anything anywhere, with conditional formatting. |
| What users think of itSource 18 | Too few public reviews to quote honestly. We are a much smaller product. | 4.5 out of 5 from 338 Capterra reviews. |
Checked 15 August 2026. All twenty-one sources are listed in full with the URL and the day each was read.
The line that should worry you most
“Data Studio doesn’t indicate if data from Google Analytics is sampled.”
That is Google's sentence, from Google's documentation, about Google's own product reading Google's own analytics data.
What sampling does
Rather than counting every session, Analytics can answer from a subset and scale the result up. It is a reasonable engineering trade and it is usually close. Usually is doing a lot of work in that sentence when the output is a conversion count somebody is about to set a budget on.
Why the silence is the problem
An estimate labelled as an estimate is useful. An estimate that looks exactly like a count is not — nobody can apply judgement to a number they do not know is soft, and the client certainly cannot. The figure sits on the page in the same typeface as everything else.
The same principle, everywhere else
It is why every projected figure in a Reports report carries a “modeled” badge until real data replaces it, why an unconfigured assumption produces no projection instead of a confident zero, and why a viewer looking at a cached figure is told on the page that it is being refreshed.
To be fair about it: this is a property of Google Analytics that any tool reading the same API inherits, ours included. The difference is disclosure — whether the report tells the reader which kind of number they are looking at. Source 12.
The arithmetic
What “free” costs a twenty-client agency
Our total is the bigger one and it stays the bigger one. The point of this arithmetic is not that we are cheaper — it is that “free” and “no bill” are different things, and the second bill is written by a company that is not Google.
The agency
A twenty-client US agency. Every client runs Google Ads and GA4, which Google connects for nothing. Fifteen of them also run Meta, Microsoft Advertising or LinkedIn — none of which has a Google-built connector — so roughly sixty non-Google ad accounts need a partner connector.
Data Studio
- The toolfree, at any scale
- $0
- Google Ads, GA4, Search ConsoleGoogle-built connectors, free
- $0
- Partner connector60 non-Google ad accounts across 3 platforms
- $239
- Pro, for one report builder$9 per user per project
- $9
- A support plan you can actually useGoogle Cloud Customer Care, minimum
- $29
The $239 is Catchr's published Growth tier, the cheapest of the five partner vendors we priced whose published limits definitely cover sixty accounts. Dataslayer's equivalent is $345. Supermetrics allows seven accounts per data source on its published tiers, so twenty clients puts you into a quote-only Enterprise conversation.
Reports
- Client reports20 × $29.95, the published rate at 10–24 clients
- $599
- White labelflat, per month
- $99
- Meta, Microsoft Advertising, LinkedInnative connectors, no separate charge
- $0
- Supportincluded
- $0
Billed monthly with no commitment. Sixty non-Google ad accounts do not appear on this bill, because the unit is the client report.
What this arithmetic assumes
- Data Studio is cheaper here by $421 a month and would be cheaper at any size we tried. Nothing below is an attempt to reverse that.
- The partner-connector figure is the cheapest published option whose account limits clearly cover the scenario. Two of the five vendors we priced could not be computed at exactly sixty accounts from their public pages, so we did not guess; one would not quote publicly at all.
- Google's own gallery says of every one of those connectors: “Google makes no promises or commitments about the performance, quality, or content of the services and applications provided by these connectors.” The connector bill is a third party's price list, and it is theirs to change.
- Pro is priced per user per project. One builder is the friendliest possible reading; a three-person reporting team on separate projects multiplies it.
- The support line is the minimum monthly spend on Google Cloud Customer Care. Data Studio Pro on its own does not entitle you to raise a ticket — you need both.
- The honest symmetry: our own Windsor.ai bridge runs on your Windsor API key, so reaching a platform we have no native connector for puts you on a third party's price list too. The scenario above avoids that only because Meta, Microsoft Advertising and LinkedIn are all native here.
- We have not put a number on the hours either option costs to run, because we could not find a defensible source for one and would rather leave a gap than invent a figure.
Maintenance
What an agency on Data Studio has absorbed since 2022
Not a list of grievances — a list of dated, Google-published changes, four of which Google itself labels breaking. This is the cost that never appears on a pricing page.
Data Studio is renamed Looker StudioSource 1
The first rename. Documentation, URLs and the product name all move, and every agency's internal wiki quietly goes out of date.
Universal Analytics stops processing hitsSource 1
Not Data Studio's doing, but it landed in Data Studio's lap: every report built on a UA data source had to be rebuilt onto GA4, with different fields and a different data model.
- Breaking change
Owner's Credentials setting changeSource 1
Google's own release notes mark this a breaking change: with the admin setting disabled, existing data sources using Owner's Credentials had to switch to Viewer's Credentials, and viewers without their own access to the underlying data lose it.
- Breaking change
Email recipient quotas, and Send now moves behind ProSource 1Source 10
Scheduled email gained per-day and per-month recipient limits, and the Send now button, custom subject line and preview image became Pro features. A capability agencies were already using became a paid one.
- Breaking change
Viewer's Credentials stop rendering hyperlinks and imagesSource 1
Marked breaking by Google: with Viewer's Credentials enabled on a data source, hyperlinks and images in its dimensions no longer render. Anyone who had built a report with clickable landing pages or product thumbnails found them gone.
Looker Studio is renamed back to Data StudioSource 1Source 2
The product returns to its original name, the domain moves to datastudio.google.com and the entire help centre relocates. Google's position is that no report needs updating, and as far as we can tell that is true — but every link, screenshot, training document and client-facing explainer you wrote in between now says the wrong name.
- Breaking change
Google Ads location extension fields stop serving dataSource 1
Sixteen Google Ads and Search Ads 360 location extension fields were deprecated at the end of April and stopped returning data days later. Reports using them error until somebody rebuilds them onto the replacement asset location fields.
To be fair: Google’s position on the 2026 rename is that no report needed updating, and we found nothing to contradict it. The four entries marked breaking are Google’s own label, not ours. And a product still shipping this much is a product still being invested in — Gemini, Conversational Analytics and Slack delivery all arrived in the same window.
What actually changes
The four things a client-facing report needs that free does not cover
Each of these is a documented gap rather than a matter of taste, which is why they are the four we lead with.
Your name on the report, not Google's
Every ad platform, without a second subscription
Delivery that looks like it came from you
A report that says which numbers are soft
What agencies actually say about it
Where we would not move you
From both sides of the report
The rebuild, the count, and what lands in the inbox
Three accounts on the three things this comparison turns on: maintaining reports by hand, whether every channel reaches the total, and how the report reaches the client.
The monthly rebuild
We were rebuilding the same four dashboards every month and still getting asked where the Local Services leads had gone. Now the report is already standing when we walk into the meeting, and the lead count is the whole lead count.
Counting every channel
The first month it counted both channels, our cost per lead dropped by twenty dollars on paper. Nothing about the marketing had changed — somebody was finally adding it up properly. That is the number we set the budget on.
Scheduled delivery
One email at the start of the month with the whole picture and a paragraph telling me what it means. I have stopped asking for the call.
Straight answers
Questions people ask before leaving Looker Studio
Answered against Google's own documentation as read on 15 August 2026, including the two questions where the fair answer favours them.
- Is Looker Studio still called Looker Studio?
- No. On 16 April 2026 Google renamed it back to Data Studio and moved the product to datastudio.google.com, with the old address redirecting. Google’s own documentation says the change required no action on existing reports. We have kept this page at its old URL because “Looker Studio alternative” is still what people type.
- Is Data Studio really free?
- Yes, and we are not going to hedge it. Creators and viewers cost nothing, there is no cap on reports or viewers, and clients do not need a Google account to open one. Data Studio Pro is $9 per user per project per month and adds team workspaces, more delivery schedules and Gemini. It adds no white-label capability of any kind.
- Can I white-label a Data Studio report?
- No. Google’s documentation is unambiguous: “Embedded reports always contain the Data Studio watermark and full-screen option. You can’t remove these.” There is no custom domain, and Pro adds nothing here. You can theme a report extensively — fonts, colours, palettes, even a theme extracted from a logo — but the theme is per-report and only one custom theme exists at a time, so every client gets it rebuilt by hand.
- Why does everyone complain that it is slow?
- Partly because it often is on large datasets, and partly because the fixes cost something. Google documents no numeric limit on charts or pages; the causes it names are dataset size, query complexity and network latency. The documented remedies are longer cache windows, which costs freshness; Extract Data, capped at 100 MB and static once extracted; or BigQuery BI Engine, which costs money. On top of that, GA4 imposes its own API quotas, and a report that trips them shows the client an error rather than a number.
- What is the sampling problem?
- Google Analytics sometimes returns a sampled result rather than a full count, and Google’s documentation states plainly that “Data Studio doesn’t indicate if data from Google Analytics is sampled.” So a sampled figure and a counted figure look identical on the page a client is reading, and there is no way for either of you to tell which one you are looking at. For a page you are asking a client to make budget decisions from, that is the most serious thing on this comparison.
- How many tables can a blend combine?
- Five. That limit has not changed. Worth correcting one outdated complaint while we are here: blends now support inner, left, right, full and cross joins — the old grumble that only left joins exist is years out of date. The real restriction is that join conditions accept equality only.
- Do my clients need a Google account?
- Not to view a report shared by link — that is a genuine advantage and it matches ours. One exception worth knowing: if you use filter-by-email to give each client their own slice of a shared report, every viewer must sign in, even when the report is public.
- What would make you tell me to stay on Data Studio?
- Reports living in BigQuery, a client base that does not care whose logo is at the bottom of the page, or a budget of zero. All three are common and all three are good reasons. Free is a real advantage and it does not stop being one at scale.
Sources
Everything on this page you can check yourself
Competitor pricing and feature lists move. Each entry records the page we read and the day we read it, so you can see how old a claim is before you act on it.
- 1Data Studio release notes — April 2026 rename
Google Cloud documentation · checked August 15, 2026
Entry dated 16 April 2026: “We've rebranded Looker Studio as Data Studio.” The same release-notes page is the source for the December 2024, March 2025 and September 2025 changes Google itself labels breaking, and for the April 2026 Google Ads field deprecations.
- 2Welcome to Data Studio
Google Cloud documentation · checked August 15, 2026
Last updated 11 August 2026. “In April 2026, the Looker Studio product name returned to its original name: Data Studio.” Confirms the product URL moved to datastudio.google.com, with lookerstudio.google.com redirecting.
- 3Data Studio product page and pricing
Google Cloud · checked August 15, 2026
“Data Studio is available at no charge for creators and report viewers.” Data Studio Pro is listed at $9 per user per project per month.
- 4About Data Studio Pro
Google Cloud documentation · checked August 15, 2026
Lists what Pro adds: Cloud project ownership and IAM, team workspaces, up to 200 delivery schedules per report, Chat and Slack delivery, chart alerts, CMEK, data residency and Gemini. Also carries the support condition: “To receive technical support for Data Studio Pro issues, you'll need both a Google Cloud support plan and a Data Studio Pro subscription.” White label and custom branding are not mentioned anywhere on the page.
- 5Google Cloud Customer Care pricing
Google Cloud · checked August 15, 2026
Standard support carries a minimum spend of $29.00 a month; Enhanced a minimum of $100.00. This is the plan Data Studio Pro requires you to hold separately before you can raise a support case.
- 6Embed a report
Google Cloud documentation · checked August 15, 2026
Last updated 11 August 2026. Verbatim: “Embedded reports always contain the Data Studio watermark and full-screen option. You can't remove these.” The page also notes that viewers can click through from the foot of an embedded report to open it in Data Studio.
- 7Themes and layout
Google Cloud documentation · checked August 15, 2026
Fonts, colours, backgrounds and chart palettes are all customisable, and a theme can be extracted from a logo image. The documented limits: “Custom themes aren't shared across reports”, “You can have one custom theme at a time”, and themes apply to a whole report rather than to individual pages.
- 8Available connectors and the Partner Connector gallery
Google Cloud documentation and datastudio.google.com · checked August 15, 2026
Roughly twenty Google-built connectors, covering Google Ads, Google Analytics, Search Console, Campaign Manager 360, Display & Video 360, Search Ads 360, Ad Manager 360, YouTube Analytics, BigQuery, Sheets, Excel, CSV and several databases — set against about 1,400 partner connectors in the gallery. There is no Google-built connector for Meta, LinkedIn, Microsoft Advertising, TikTok or Google Local Services Ads.
- 9Partner Connector gallery disclaimer
datastudio.google.com · checked August 15, 2026
Verbatim: “The connectors provided by third party partners in this Community Connectors Gallery are not provided by Google. Google makes no promises or commitments about the performance, quality, or content of the services and applications provided by these connectors.”
- 10Schedule automatic report delivery
Google Cloud documentation · checked August 15, 2026
Delivery is PDF by email. Free accounts get “no more than one schedule” per report and a maximum of once a day, with recipient quotas of 200 a day and 800 a month; Pro raises this to 200 schedules per report, hourly, with no such quotas. Slack delivery and the Send now button are Pro-only. Maximum 50 email recipients per send.
- 11Download a report as PDF
Google Cloud documentation · checked August 15, 2026
Documented limitations: only tables and pivot tables can be expanded, and only vertically; components with gradient backgrounds, borders or vertical stacking may not render correctly; individual charts can show “System Error” despite working in the report; and complex or multi-page reports can time out, producing incomplete downloads or none at all.
- 12Google Analytics 4 sampling in Data Studio
Google Cloud documentation · checked August 15, 2026
Verbatim: “Data Studio doesn't indicate if data from Google Analytics is sampled.” This is the single most consequential line in the whole comparison: a sampled figure and a counted figure look identical on the page a client is reading.
- 13Google Analytics Data API v1 quotas
Google for Developers · checked August 15, 2026
Updated 14 August 2026. Standard properties are limited to 200,000 core tokens per property per day, 40,000 per hour, 14,000 per project per property per hour, and 10 concurrent requests. Google's own troubleshooting guide lists the resulting errors, including “Exhausted concurrent requests quota” and “This property has issued too many requests in the last hour.”
- 14How blends work
Google Cloud documentation · checked August 15, 2026
Last updated 11 August 2026. “A blend can have up to five tables.” Inner, left, right, full and cross joins are all supported — the old complaint that only left joins exist is out of date — but join conditions accept equality only.
- 16Community thread: blank space added to the top of every exported PDF page
Google Developer Community · checked August 15, 2026
Opened 15 April 2026, 26 posts. A Google staff member replied on 17 April 2026 that a fix was being worked on. We found no closure notice, and we have not re-tested it ourselves — so treat this as a documented episode rather than a current defect.
- 17Community thread: downloaded PDFs not respecting data controls
Google Developer Community · checked August 15, 2026
Ran from 23 April 2026 to 28 June 2026 and closed without a fix: a report's data control selection is ignored in the downloaded PDF, which reverts to the default.
- 18Data Studio reviews
Capterra · checked August 15, 2026
4.5 out of 5 from 338 reviews. Users broadly like this product and we are not going to imply otherwise. The two reviews quoted on this page are from a marketing technologist in e-learning (April 2026) and an analytics manager in real estate (October 2025); we name the role and the date rather than the individual.
- 19Catchr pricing
catchr.io · checked August 15, 2026
Starter $23.90 a month billed annually for 3 platforms and 10 accounts; Growth $239 a month for 10 platforms and 100 accounts; Scale $599 for 25 and 500. A “platform” is one connected data source and an “account” is one profile inside it, which is what makes the sixty-account scenario computable on their published figures.
- 20Dataslayer pricing
dataslayer.ai · checked August 15, 2026
Free (1 connector, 1 account); Starter $35 a month billed annually (3 connectors, 3 accounts each); Advanced $115 (7 connectors, 50 accounts each); Pro $345 (10 connectors, 100 accounts each). Sixty accounts on one platform exceeds the Advanced limit of fifty, which is what pushes the scenario to Pro.
- 21Supermetrics pricing
supermetrics.com · checked August 15, 2026
Starter from $55 a month billed monthly or $44 billed yearly, for 3 data sources and 3 accounts per source; Growth from $222 monthly or $177 yearly, for 6 data sources and 7 accounts per source; Enterprise by quote. Looker Studio is a destination inside the standard tiers rather than a plan of its own. Twenty clients means well over seven accounts per source, so this scenario falls outside their published tiers entirely.
Other comparisons
Weighing up more than one
Most agencies shortlist three or four. Here is the same treatment for the rest of them.
- Reports vs AgencyAnalyticsThe best-known per-client reporting platform for agencies. One rate, white label included, and the largest connector catalogue in the set.
- Reports vs DashThisStraightforward dashboard reporting priced by how many dashboards you keep, with white label included at every tier.
- Reports vs SwydoThe cheapest credible entry point in the category: one flat fee, unlimited clients, priced by connected data source.
- Reports vs DataboxA metrics and goal-tracking product with a free tier and a separate agency price list, aimed as much at in-house teams as at agencies.
- Reports vs Spreadsheets and slidesStill the most common reporting stack in the industry: exports, a spreadsheet, and a deck rebuilt every month.