Google Data Studio

I like how Google Data Studio takes marketing data and visualizes it through a user-friendly interface, in addition to offering free tools that are paid on other platforms, it can work with a large amount of data. The advantage is that it connects natively with all Google products such as analytics, this is very useful when working with the integration of all these platforms since they are compatible. I like the interactive way you present the reports. An advantage of using Google products is that there is a large community that contributes with tutorials and experiences.

so far I am satisfied with GDS, but would like to see more integrations with other platforms and not be limited to just google services.

Being fully cloud based embedded within GSuite makes it the best and easiest solution for internal dashboards amongst your team. It's quite valuable not having to break your workflow and manage different logins and makes it super easy to share with a subset or whole of your organization

There is no support so you are on your own if things are going wrong. The connectors are also much less stable than other tools with frequent I/O problems or times when things are inexplicably broken for hours or days, and you are in the dark since there is no support.

It seems that every third party SaaS that collects data online has native synchronization support for Google sheets. And this is how Google Data Studio makes itself the best option for non profits and small businesses in need of automated business intelligence.

On top of the plug'n'play integration experience, data studio has a unique approach to interactive chart and dashboard design that lets you position elements as if you were working in Adobe Photoshop. You can add shapes, layer elements on top of each other, add text or objects anywhere. This means you can produce the most beautiful and intuitive dashboards and reports ever (or the least if you're more of a Picasso).

It really is the poor man's business intelligence automation tool. Some key setbacks for data scientists is that data studio can only do 1 type of join/blend (outter left) and when using blended data to create calculated fields it really feel more like art than science, and not always working out. There is also no way to create unions across all data sources or make a file directory a data source.

All this means that you really need to do a lot of data prep in Google sheets and find a way to do some automatic data blending in Google sheets as well in some cases. This will keep the complexity of your needs in Data Studio minimal, which seems to work best.

Once it's build your data sources, it's easy to build your dashboards even they don't have the best data viz options. It's in the Google tech stack, that makes easy to your team keep running. Would like to have Microsoft Power BI? It was my concerto too! But yes, Google Data Studio will deliver all info you need in a beautiful interface - don't worry. Good price, clear and light interface, access from any device. Your data project will meet the needs.

Different from Microsoft Power BI for example, you don't have a on screen calculation, easy to work on. Many times you need to create new fields, build cases with calculations to have the field to use on. You need an administrator/builder with more tech skills. But any doubt that I found, I had case or example in the web to search and use. But once it's build the base, it's easy to build dashboards, deploy, upgrade and so one.