Power BI vs Looker Studio (now Data Studio): the honest comparison for UK SMEs

For a UK SME on Microsoft 365 with numbers that must reconcile, Power BI is usually the better buy. If your reporting is mostly Google Ads, Analytics and Sheets, and one-off reports will do, Looker Studio, renamed Data Studio in April 2026, is free and often enough. The licence saving is real; the missing data model is the catch.

Is Looker Studio the same thing as Data Studio now?

Yes. Google announced in April 2026 that Looker Studio would go back to its old name, Data Studio, and that Looker Studio Pro would become Data Studio Pro. Existing reports and users moved across with no action needed. Plenty of people still search for the old name, so we use both here, but Google's documentation now says Data Studio.

The same announcement is useful for another reason: it says what Google thinks the product is for. It calls Data Studio the ideal choice for "personal data exploration", with ad-hoc reports across Google's own products. Looker stays as the enterprise platform. Keep that in mind, because it explains most of the differences below.

What do they actually cost?

	Power BI (UK, ex VAT)	Data Studio (USD list)
Build reports	Free (Power BI Desktop)	No charge
Publish and share with colleagues	Pro, £10.80 per user/month	No charge
Read-only viewers	Pro each, unless on F64 capacity or above	No charge
Paid team tier	Premium Per User, £18.50 per user/month	Pro, $9 per user per project/month
Who needs the paid licence	Everyone who views shared content, below F64	Only people who create, edit or manage Pro content

Figures are from Microsoft's UK pricing page and Google's Data Studio page, as of November 2026. Microsoft's prices are billed yearly. Google says its per-user price varies with subscription length, and it bills monthly for every Pro licence, whether or not anyone uses it.

The viewer row is where the gap opens up. Microsoft's licensing rules require a paid licence for each person viewing Power BI content in a Pro workspace or on Fabric capacity below F64. Our Power BI licensing guide covers that threshold in full.

Take three people who build reports and twenty who only read them, as of November 2026:

Set-up	Licences	Cost per year
Data Studio, standard	None	$0
Data Studio Pro, one project	3 authors at $9 a month	$324
Power BI Pro	23 users at £10.80 a month	£2,980.80 ex VAT

We would not read that table as the whole answer. Licences are rarely the largest cost of reporting. For the full picture on the Power BI side, see how to budget a Power BI project or try our pricing estimator.

What does the free tool leave out?

The "hidden trade-offs" are all published, if you know where to look.

A shared data model. A Power BI semantic model holds your tables, relationships and measures in one place, so "gross margin" means the same thing on every report. Google's own comparison page suggests Data Studio for one-off reports and single or pre-aggregated data sources, and points customers who need governed metric definitions to Looker. In Data Studio you can blend up to five data sources, but that is not the same as modelling a business.

Excel as a source. Google's documentation describes file upload as CSV only, with a 100MB limit per dataset and 2GB of storage per user, and says uploaded data cannot refresh automatically. Power BI can connect to an Excel file on OneDrive or SharePoint and refresh on a schedule. For a business whose numbers start in Excel, that often decides it.

Paid connectors. Google-built connectors are free, but the same page warns that community connectors may cost money. If your data sits in a CRM or accounting package, price the connector before calling the tool free.

Row-level access. Data Studio can filter a report by viewer email, which works for simple cases. Viewers must sign in and consent to sharing their address, and the case of the address in your data must match their account. Power BI's row-level security is defined as roles in the model, and our plain-English explainer shows what that looks like.

Organisational ownership. Google says Pro content belongs to your organisation rather than to individuals, and keeps working if its creator leaves. Team workspaces, scheduled delivery to Google Chat, Google Cloud support and data residency options are also on the Pro list. Our reading is that these are the things to check on the free tier before a key person leaves, or before a client asks where your data is held.

Where does Data Studio genuinely win?

Price, for wide read-only audiences. Twenty people reading a report costs nothing. If that report answers the question, you have no reason to pay for more.

Google marketing data. Data Studio's connectors for Google Ads, Analytics and Sheets are free and built by Google. A marketing team that lives in those tools can have a working report quickly, without an IT project.

Sharing outside the business. Viewers do not need a paid licence, which suits reports for clients or partners.

Low commitment. You can find out whether a report gets used before spending anything. If nobody opens it, you have learned that for free.

Where does Power BI genuinely win?

Numbers that must agree. Finance, operations and board reporting need one definition of each measure across many reports. That is the job a properly shaped model does, and DAX can handle the time intelligence and allocation logic that goes with it.

Living inside Microsoft 365. If your logins, files, Teams and Excel are already Microsoft, Power BI uses what you have. This is the same argument we made in our Power BI vs Tableau comparison, and it tends to matter most in businesses without a dedicated IT team.

Predictable refresh. Power BI lets you schedule up to eight refreshes a day on shared capacity and 48 on Premium. Data Studio works differently: it caches query results for a set time by connector. Sheets defaults to every 15 minutes and Analytics to every 12 hours, while Google Ads is fixed at 12 hours. Neither approach is wrong, but it is worth checking against how current your report has to be.

Room to grow. If you later need pipelines or a lakehouse, Microsoft Fabric sits on the same platform, and our data engineering work builds on that. Google has its own route through BigQuery, so this one only counts if you are already a Microsoft business.

So which should a UK SME choose?

Here is our decision rule. It is opinion, so test it against your own situation.

Stay on Data Studio if your data is mostly in Google products, the reports are departmental, one person understands them, and a small disagreement in the numbers would not matter. Many marketing teams fit this, and they do not need us.

Choose Power BI if you run on Microsoft 365, your sources include Excel, SQL Server or accounting data, more than one team needs to agree on the same figures, or the reports feed decisions about money. Our Power BI consultancy page covers that work, and our wider data practice covers what sits underneath it.

Consider running both if marketing is happy in Data Studio and finance needs Power BI. They can sit side by side, as long as you accept they will not share definitions, and that a marketing number and a finance number may differ.

Choose neither yet if the real problem is messy source data. A dashboard will only show the mess faster. If you are still deciding whether you need a BI tool at all, start with Power BI vs Excel.

If you do switch later, plan on rebuilding the reports rather than converting them, and treat that as part of the cost. That is our own planning assumption rather than a vendor figure. The clean, well-structured data underneath is the part worth keeping.

Our declared bias

We sell Power BI work, and you should weigh this post with that in mind. We have tried to be fair by naming the cases where we would tell you to stay on the free tool, and by linking every price and limit to the vendor's own page. Prices and features change, so check those pages before you commit.

Frequently asked questions

Is Looker Studio still free?

Yes. Google renamed it Data Studio in April 2026, and as of November 2026 its pricing page says the standard version has no charge for creators or report viewers. Google's own connectors are free too, but community connectors may cost money. The paid edition, Data Studio Pro, is listed at $9 per user per project per month.

Is Looker Studio the same as Looker?

No, and the similar names cause a lot of confusion. Data Studio, formerly Looker Studio, is the drag-and-drop reporting tool. Looker is a separate enterprise BI platform, which Google positions for governed metric definitions and data modelling. Most comparisons a small business is looking for are about Data Studio, not Looker.

Can Looker Studio connect to Excel files?

Not directly, in the documentation we checked. Google describes file upload as CSV only, with a 100MB limit per dataset and 2GB of storage per user, and uploaded data cannot refresh automatically. The practical route is to move the data into Google Sheets. If your reporting lives in Excel on SharePoint, Power BI is the more natural fit.

Which is cheaper for a small team, Power BI or Looker Studio?

Data Studio, on licences alone. As of November 2026 a team of three authors and twenty viewers pays nothing for standard Data Studio, against about £2,981 a year ex VAT for 23 Power BI Pro licences. The comparison narrows once you count the time spent reconciling numbers that a shared data model would have settled.

You are a Power BI consultancy. Can this comparison be trusted?

Judge the reasoning rather than the conclusion. We sell Power BI work, and we have said plainly where the free tool is enough and when we would tell a business to stay on it. Every price and limit here links to Google's or Microsoft's own pages, so you can check them yourself.

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Easy Insight is a UK consultancy for AI, web, apps and data — senior specialists only, no juniors.