Power BI or Looker Studio: which suits a small business
An honest comparison of the two most used dashboard tools: what each really costs, where each falls down and why the tool is the least important of the three decisions you have to make.
· Data and BI
It is one of the most searched questions among people who want to stop living in a spreadsheet. And the answer starts with an uncomfortable warning: the tool is the least important of the three decisions. The other two — where the data comes from and who maintains it — decide whether the dashboard is still alive in six months. That said, the comparison does matter, so here it is.
Looker Studio
Google's dashboard tool. It runs in the browser, nothing is installed and sharing a report is free: you send a link and whoever opens it sees it. It connects natively to Google Analytics, Google Ads, Google Sheets and BigQuery.
Where it shines: marketing and web dashboards, reports that have to be shared with lots of people or with external clients, and teams already living in Google's ecosystem.
Where it falls short: when the volume grows or the calculations get complicated. It has no powerful modelling engine, data transformations have to be done before the data comes in, and with large sets it gets slow. And connectors to non-Google databases are usually third-party and paid.
Power BI
Microsoft's. It is a complete analysis tool: it brings Power Query for transforming data before modelling it and DAX as a calculation language, which resolves things that in Looker Studio simply cannot be posed — comparisons against the same period last year, rolling totals, analysis across several related tables.
Where it shines: financial and accounting analysis, models with several related sources, calculations with business logic, and companies that already have Microsoft 365.
Where it hurts: the per-person licence cost. Power BI Desktop is free for building, but for other people to see your published report a licence is needed. And there is the budget trap: the price per user per month looks low, but multiplied by ten people and by twelve months it is not. If twenty people have to see the dashboard, do the arithmetic before starting.
An honest comparison
- Cost of entry: Looker Studio wins clearly.
- Cost as you grow: Looker Studio gets expensive through third-party connectors; Power BI, through viewing licences. Both get expensive, for different reasons.
- Calculation power: Power BI, no argument.
- Sharing with people outside: Looker Studio, no argument.
- Learning curve: Looker Studio is learned in an afternoon; Power BI properly requires understanding modelling, and DAX has a real curve.
- Performance at volume: Power BI, thanks to its in-memory engine.
The two decisions that do matter
1. Where the data comes from
A dashboard is worth nothing if somebody has to export a spreadsheet every Monday to feed it. That dashboard is abandoned by the second month, every time. The right question is: can the data arrive by itself? From the bank, from the ERP, from the accounting software, from the online shop. If the answer is no, the first job is not the dashboard: it is the connection.
2. What questions it has to answer
The most expensive mistake in dashboards is building the pretty thirty-indicator panel nobody looks at. A useful dashboard answers three or four concrete questions that are hard to answer today: will I make it to the end of the month? which customers owe me and since when? which product actually leaves a margin? how much is each customer costing me?
If you cannot write those questions on a napkin before opening the tool, it is not time to open it yet.
The practical recommendation
Start with Looker Studio if your data is marketing or web, if you have to share with lots of people, or if you still do not know what you want to measure and need to experiment cheaply.
Go to Power BI if the analysis is financial, if you need to cross accounting with sales and costs, or if you already pay for Microsoft 365 and the licences are not a leap.
And a third option almost nobody raises: if what you need is one specific, recurring answer — the projected balance for the coming weeks, the list of overdue invoices — sometimes no BI tool is needed at all. An automatic report arriving by email every Monday is enough. It is cheaper, it maintains itself and it is read without opening anything.
If this sounds like you
We build dashboards with both, and we choose on the basis we have just described, not on preference. Data that connects by itself and a dashboard that answers your questions are data analysis and BI. If what you are after is specifically the cash position, the fixed-scope job is the treasury dashboard, and we cover it in full in knowing today whether you make it to the end of the month.
If you suspect the problem comes earlier — that the data is spread across sheets nobody reconciles — start with when a spreadsheet is no longer enough.
We are Mindset & Code: automation, data and development for small businesses. What matters is that the dashboard connects to your real data and not to a manual export that somebody has to redo every Monday. You can see what we do and what it costs.
Licence terms and available connectors for both tools change frequently: they are checked in the manufacturer's official documentation before committing a budget. General guidance.