Related Articles

Are you looking for cutting-edge business intelligence and data visualization solutions? Microsoft Power BI and Google Data Studio are gaining pretty much momentum these days. Both are of a kind where one allows you to create customized charts and reports in seconds while the other offers interactive charts with powerful business intelligence capabilities. The following post by our SharePoint Development team provides a brief comparison of Google Data Studio vs Power BI in regards to:
- Ease of use
- Complexity and integration
- Reliability
- Pricing
Table of Content
Business Intelligence
Business Intelligence (BI) is a group of architectures, techniques, and activities. BI is a technology-driven process that helps BI consultants transform raw information into useful information for analysis and carry out lucrative activities to assist corporate end consumers in executing their business plans for an expected SharePoint development services achievement.
BI has a direct effect on the strategic, tactical, and operational business decisions of an organization. BI involves a broad range of tools, applications, and methodologies to make a fact-based decision by following the below chronological steps on the data.
- Gather the data from inner systems and external sources.
- Prepare that data for analysis and run queries against it.
- Create reports, dashboards, maps, graphs, charts, etc.
- Make analytical results based on the data visualizations.
Importance of Business Intelligence
- BI software has a direct or indirect impact on a business’s operation and profitable decision.
- BI’s primary goal is to possibly benefit business intelligence tools, including accelerating and enhancing decision-making, optimizing internal business procedures, increasing operating effectiveness, driving fresh revenue, and gaining a competitive advantage over competitors.
- It is generating KPI (Key Performance Indicators) based on historical data.
- The BI systems help companies to identify market trends, identify & set benchmarks for various business processes, and spot the business problems that need to be addressed by BI consultants.
- BI data include historical data stored in a data warehouse, as well as fresh data collected as it is produced from source devices, allowing BI tool to have a data visualization for enhancing the data quality and supporting strategic & tactical decision-making processes without sparing its quality.
- BI assists in identifying customer behavior and feedback, analysis of company performance with the past, optimizing company activities, identifying market trends, and helping to address any business problems or issues.
- At initial level, the data analysts and other IT experts would conduct data analysis from the generated query reports for the users of the company. For report generation they majorly used BI tools. Nowadays, it can be used by more and more businesses, not just the enterprises but by SMEs (Small and Medium Enterprises) too.
BI Tools
The data discovery, which used to be restricted to sophisticated analytics experts, can now be done by everyone using these BI tools. These instruments offer perspectives into things like growth, solving pressing problems, collecting all data in one location, forecasting future results, and so much more.
There are many BI tools available for BI consultants in the market, and some of them are mentioned below. Keep in mind that these tools differ in robustness, integration capabilities, ease of use (from a technical point of view), and pricing.
Sr. No. | BI Tools | Website |
---|---|---|
1 | Power BI | https://powerbi.microsoft.com |
2 | Google Data Studio | https://support.google.com/datastudio |
3 | SplashBI | https://splashbi.com |
4 | Domo | https://domo.com |
5 | Oracle BI | https://www.oracle.com/middleware/technologies/bi.html |
6 | Tableau | https://www.tableau.com |
7 | Clear Analytics | http://www.clearanalyticsbi.com |
8 | Looker | https://looker.com |
9 | SAS BI | https://www.sas.com/en_us/solutions/business-intelligence.html |
10 | SAP BI | https://www.sap.com |
11 | Dundas BI | https://www.dundas.com/dundas-bi |
In this blog, we will go through the BI tools provided by the two giants companies: Microsoft and Google.
- Microsoft Power BI
- Google Data Studio
Microsoft Power BI
Power BI is a business intelligence platform developed by Microsoft and has lot of benefits.
- It is a web-based business analytics tool suite that excels in data visualization.
- Power BI is a robust, extensive modeling and real-time analytics tool as well as allows for custom development.
- This data analytics tool allows to connect multiple data sources for preparing dashboards or reports.
- It is providing a user-friendly interface and excellent data visualization capabilities.
- This software enables customers to integrate their applications and produce reports and dashboards in real-time.
- As it is web-based, it is possible to access Microsoft Power BI from almost anywhere. It has a cloud-based and on-premises data warehouse.
- It targets medium-sized businesses and large enterprises.
There are main key parts of Microsoft Power BI –
- Power BI Desktop – It is a window desktop application to allow developers to build reports and dashboards.
- Power BI Service – It is Online Software as a Service called Power BI Service.
- Power BI Mobile Apps – It’s a mobile application for iOS, Windows, and Android to view dashboards or reports on mobile devices.
- Power BI Server – which allows BI Consultants to publish reports in the On-premise version after creating reports in Power BI Desktop.
Google Data Studio
Data Studio is a BI tool by Google.
- Google Data Studio is a data visualization tool that allows a user to create a branded dashboard with data visualizations.
- It is a fully web-based custom software solution that enables you to produce customized graphs and reports in seconds.
- It is easy to use, customize, and share reports if you already have a google account.. It’s interface is intuitive, simple and straightforward.
- Google Data Studio is also designed primarily for consumers and small businesses.
- It provides almost any widget or visual which the user wants to represent data—for example, Bar, Line, Geo map, etc.
- Users can also change the logo or image or color/size of the font in the report.
- Google data studio provides functionality for sharing and permission the same as Google Doc and Google Sheet, so users can easily share this report with another person or configure permission on reports.
- Users can also configure reports as public web. So, there is no credential required to view this report.
Features Listing
Sr.No. | Features | Microsoft Power BI | Google Data Studio (GDS) |
---|---|---|---|
1 | Released | Microsoft Power BI was published the year 2013 before GDS and published to the public. | As part of the Google Analytics 360 suite, Google Data Studio (GDS) was released in 2016. |
2 | Availability | Power BI has a desktop and cloud-based version. | Google data studio has a cloud-based version. |
3 | Data Source | There are approx. 110 data connectors are available divided into 6 different categories.1. File: Excel, CSV, XML, etc.2. Database: SQL, Access, Teradata, SAP, etc.3. Power BI: Power BI dataset and Power BI data flow.4. Azure: Azure SQL database, Azure SQL data warehouse, Azure blob storage, etc.5. Online Services: Dynamic 365, SharePoint Online, Salesforce, Google Analytics, etc.6. Other: Microsoft exchange, ODBC, OLEDB, Spark, R Script, etc. |
Currently, approx. 180 data connectors are available divided into 3 main categories.1. Google Connectors: BigQuery, Google Sheets, Google Ads, etc.2. Partners Connectors: Custom JSON/CSV/XML, Facebook Ads, Amazon Ads, Instagram Ads, LinkedIn Ads, Twitter, Vimeo, YouTube, etc.3. Open Source Connectors: GitHub, Stack overflow question, Meetup, Google Fit, etc. |
4 | Scheduling |
|
Users can schedule the process of downloading the report in PDF and sending it to you, or your customers’ weekly/monthly by mail. |
5 | Chart Template or Widget |
1. Import from file: User can add its own custom visual (Chart template) 2. Import from a marketplace: Users can add it from a marketplace where some other developer has added custom visuals. |
It is providing approx. 30 chart templates, for example, Table, Time series, Pie, Line, Geo map, etc. |
6 | Pricing | Microsoft Power BI has a pricing plan. Free version with basic reporting feature and Pro version gives you full features with real-time dashboard updates. For pricing, refer to this link. |
|
7 | Sharing |
|
|
8 | Reliability |
|
|
9 | Complexity and Integration |
|
|
10 | Data Cleanup & Transformation |
|
|
11 | Ease of use |
|
|
12 | Visualization |
|
|
Microsoft Power BI Report Example
Google Data Studio Report Example
Advantages and Disadvantages of using Power BI and Google Data Studio
Whilst in this world, everything has its two sides. In a similar manner, Microsoft Power BI and Google Data Studio have their own Pros and Cons.
Microsoft Power BI
Sr.No | Pros | Cons |
---|---|---|
1 | Power BI is a perfectly integrated Microsoft platform. | Power BI is taking a bit more time while dealing with a large amount of data. |
2 | It is compatible with mobile devices. | Users cannot share a report with another person outside of the domain. |
3 | It has the capability of complex data transformations. | For security and sharing features, one must have to use its Pro version. |
4 | It allows combining & merging data before visualizing. | The overall cost of its Pro version is higher than other suites. |
5 | Lots of out-of-the-box visualization options and widgets. | It does not accept larger files of more than 250 MB. |
6 | The large community of users and resources. | In the free version, it has a limit of 1GB of data per user. |
Google Data Studio
Sr.No | Pros | Cons |
---|---|---|
1 | Google Data Studio is free. | No data source is merging before visualizing. |
2 | Ease of creating data visuals – a user doesn’t need to be an expert in manipulating the charts. | Browser only. There is no desktop tool to create reports. |
3 | Custom metrics and dimensions can be created directly within the platform. | Limited data visualization options and widgets compare to Power BI. |
4 | Versatile, especially if utilizing other Google marketing products. | The customization option is less compared to Power BI. |
5 | Ease of sharing reports with a URL link that anyone can access and use it. | Google Data Studio is not mobile-friendly. |
6 | Users can download the report in PDF formats. | Only basic widgets and features are there, while the full suite of reporting features is not available. |
7 | Flexible GA (Google Analytics) Integrations and Live Editing. | The dynamic relationship feature between all graphs and tables on the same page is not available. |
Conclusion
Finally, we have studied the comparison between two most popular BI tools – Microsoft Power BI vs Google Data Studio. If there is a limit of cost, then one can go with either the free version of Power BI or the Google Data Studio platforms. Basically, if one is not willing to pay for, have nice and clean data already, don’t need to carry out any data clean-up, combining & merging before visualizing, don’t need to display data from different sources in one chart, etc. then stick to the Google Data Studio. On the other hand, if one expects custom software solutions to perform complex data transformations, is willing to pay, needs to view information from advertising systems outside the globe of Google, etc. then Microsoft Power BI is the best choice.

Shital Patel
Shital Patel is VP at TatvaSoft with a high-level of proficiency and technical precision in SharePoint Development. His experience of the last two decades has helped businesses to solve complex challenges resulting in growth and performance of Startups to Fortune 500 companies.
Subscribe to our Newsletter
Signup for our newsletter and join 2700+ global business executives and technology experts to receive handpicked industry insights and latest news
Build your Team
Want to Hire Skilled Developers
Power BI and Google Data Studio, both are the visualization tools, one from Microsoft and the other from Google.The thing which I liked the most about this blog is the last line which depicts clear comparison of Google Data Studio vs Power BI, that if one needs to carry out complex data transformations then Power BI is the best solution while if they have clean and simple data and has budget restrictions then Power BI is for them.