Looker Studio vs Supermetrics
An independent, review-free comparison compiled by the SaaSTracker editorial team. Both products are profiled in full, and neither can pay for placement here.
The short answer
Editorial assessmentLooker Studio compared with Supermetrics
The most common thing sitting next to a Looker Studio report. Supermetrics sells the connectors Google does not provide, moving Facebook, LinkedIn, TikTok, Shopify, and similar data into Looker Studio, Sheets, or BigQuery on a schedule. The pairing is powerful and is also where the real cost lands, since Supermetrics is priced per data source and account. Compare the total against an all-in-one agency reporting tool before assuming free plus connectors is cheaper.
Choose Looker Studio if
Small businesses, in-house marketers, and solo or small agencies that report mainly on Google data, need attractive shareable dashboards at zero software cost, and are willing to build and maintain their own templates rather than buy a client-reporting workflow.
Choose Supermetrics if
Marketing agencies producing recurring client reports, in-house teams who live in Google Sheets or Looker Studio, and any business that wants marketing data in a warehouse without building and maintaining API connectors themselves.
Side by side
13 attributes| Attribute | Looker Studio | Supermetrics |
|---|---|---|
| Category | Reporting | Analytics |
| Starting price | Free, unlimited reports and viewers; Pro from about $9 per licensed user per month (free plan available) | €49 per month (Starter), or €39 per month billed yearly (free plan available) |
| Pricing model | Two tiers. The core product is free with no user, report, or viewer limits. The paid tier (Data Studio Pro, previously Looker Studio Pro) is licensed per user per month and is attached to exactly one Google Cloud project, so an organization running several projects buys several subscriptions. Costs that are not part of either tier, and usually dominate the real bill, are third-party connectors for non-Google data and BigQuery storage and query charges. | Subscription tiered by the number of connected data sources, accounts per source, user seats, and refresh frequency, with one core destination per self-serve plan and explicitly no data volume fees. |
| Free plan | Full report building, all Google connectors, unlimited reports and viewers, one scheduled email delivery per report, 15-minute minimum data freshness, no SLA and no support channel | None; the trial is the evaluation path. |
| Free trial | 30 days on Pro, with no cap on the number of users added to the trial | 14 days, no credit card required |
| Best for | Small businesses, in-house marketers, and solo or small agencies that report mainly on Google data, need attractive shareable dashboards at zero software cost, and are willing to build and maintain their own templates rather than buy a client-reporting workflow. | Marketing agencies producing recurring client reports, in-house teams who live in Google Sheets or Looker Studio, and any business that wants marketing data in a warehouse without building and maintaining API connectors themselves. |
| Setup time | Minutes to a first Google-sourced chart, and typically half a day to a presentable multi-page client dashboard from a blank canvas. Adding non-Google data extends that to however long it takes to select, buy, and configure a connector, usually another day. A BigQuery-backed setup is a project measured in weeks, not hours. | An hour for a first working report: authorise the sources, install the destination connector, define a query, and schedule the refresh. A full agency reporting template across a dozen clients is a week of design work, most of it in the destination rather than in Supermetrics. |
| Learning curve | Low to build something that works, moderate to build something fast and maintainable. The concepts that take time are data source versus report scoping, calculated field aggregation rules, blend join behaviour, and knowing when a page is slow because of blending rather than because of the source. | Low if you can already build a spreadsheet or a Looker Studio report, since the Supermetrics part is choosing metrics, dimensions, and date ranges. The real skill required is knowing which metric from which platform means what, and that is a marketing analytics skill rather than a product one. |
| Platforms | Web browser, Looker mobile app (iOS and Android, for viewing), Embedded iframe and oEmbed, Google Workspace | Google Sheets add-on, Looker Studio connectors, Excel and Power BI connectors, Cloud data warehouse destinations, Web hub at hub.supermetrics.com |
| Compliance | GDPR, SOC 1, SOC 2, SOC 3, ISO 27001, ISO 27017, ISO 27018, HIPAA (under a Google Cloud BAA, Pro scope) | GDPR, SOC 2, ISO 27001, EU-based company and processing |
| Founded | 2016 | 2013 |
| Headquarters | Mountain View, California, United States | Helsinki, Finland |
| Ownership | Google (Alphabet Inc.) | Venture-backed; privately held and profitable |
Strengths and limitations
Looker Studio
Strengths
- Free at a level that is not a trial or a teaser: unlimited reports, unlimited viewers, and every Google data source included.
- Native, first-party access to GA4, Google Ads, Search Console, and BigQuery with no connector fee and no data pipeline to maintain.
- The free-form canvas produces reports that look designed rather than generated, which matters when a dashboard is a client deliverable.
- Sharing, permissions, and embedding follow Google Drive conventions that clients and colleagues already understand.
Limitations
- No client concept. There is no multi-client workspace, no per-client account switching on a template, and no cross-client rollup, so agencies maintain one copied report per client by hand.
- Blending is capped at five tables and is computed at render time, so heavily blended pages routinely take ten to thirty seconds to load and can freeze during interaction.
- Source API quotas bite in practice: GA4's free tier concurrent request limits produce quota errors when several people open reports at once, and a reset can take anywhere from ten minutes to a day.
- Scheduled PDF export renders what is on screen, so a table showing ten rows exports ten rows; there is no pagination and no report-grade print layout.
Supermetrics
Strengths
- The largest and best-maintained marketing connector library in the category, with the vendor fixing connectors when platforms change their APIs rather than leaving your report broken.
- No data volume fees on any package, so cost is decoupled from how much you spend on ads or how much traffic you get.
- Destination-agnostic by design, so you keep Sheets, Looker Studio, Power BI, or your warehouse rather than being pushed into another vendor's dashboard.
- Warehouse destinations and transformation tooling turn it into a genuine marketing data pipeline rather than just a reporting connector.
Limitations
- It does no attribution whatsoever: the numbers it delivers are each platform's self-reported claims, so double-counting flows straight through into your report unchallenged.
- Accounts-per-source allowances are the real constraint for agencies, and they are hit far sooner than the data source counts suggest.
- Seat counts are low at one, two, and three users, with additional seats costing €37 to €124 a month each.
- One core destination per self-serve plan means teams wanting both a spreadsheet and a BI dashboard need to check whether that is an add-on.
Pricing compared
Looker Studio
Two tiers. The core product is free with no user, report, or viewer limits. The paid tier (Data Studio Pro, previously Looker Studio Pro) is licensed per user per month and is attached to exactly one Google Cloud project, so an organization running several projects buys several subscriptions. Costs that are not part of either tier, and usually dominate the real bill, are third-party connectors for non-Google data and BigQuery storage and query charges.
- Data Studio (free)$0
- Data Studio ProAbout $9
- Looker (separate platform)Quote only
As a visualization layer, Looker Studio is close to unbeatable on price, because the price is zero and the product is genuinely capable. The honest way to evaluate it is to price the whole stack rather than the canvas. If your reporting is Google Ads, GA4, Search Console, and a Sheet, the true cost really is nothing and no paid tool can compete. Add three non-Google platforms across ten client accounts and the connector bill lands somewhere between $100 and $400 a month, at which point a purpose-built agency reporting tool with connectors included is frequently cheaper and always less work. Pro at $9 per user is fairly priced for what it fixes (ownership, governance, support) but fixes none of the things agencies actually complain about, and its one-project scoping works against the agency use case specifically.
Supermetrics
Subscription tiered by the number of connected data sources, accounts per source, user seats, and refresh frequency, with one core destination per self-serve plan and explicitly no data volume fees.
- Starter€49
- Growth€199
- Pro€499
- EnterpriseCustom
Judged against the labour it replaces, Supermetrics is easy to justify: €199 a month is a fraction of the cost of the two or three days a month an agency currently spends assembling reports by hand, and the maintained connectors mean nobody has to fix a broken API integration on a Sunday. The absence of data volume fees is a real structural advantage over dashboard tools that meter usage. What makes the pricing feel expensive is the allowance structure: low seat counts, one core destination, and accounts-per-source ceilings that agencies hit quickly, all of which push a genuinely small team from €49 to €199 faster than the tier list suggests. Price your actual account count before comparing against Databox, and be clear that you are buying plumbing rather than answers.
Editorial verdict on each
Looker Studio
Looker Studio, now Data Studio again, is the most widely used reporting tool in small-business marketing for one very good reason: it is free, it reads every Google source natively, and the reports it produces look designed rather than generated. For anyone reporting mainly on Google Ads, GA4, Search Console, and a spreadsheet, no paid product offers better value, because the value is infinite. The case against it is entirely about what surrounds the canvas. Non-Google data always costs money through a connector or a pipeline, heavy blending makes pages slow, GA4 quota errors are a routine annoyance, PDFs export what is on screen rather than a proper document, there is no version history, and there is no client concept at all, so an agency past a dozen accounts is doing real manual labour that a paid tool would eliminate. Pro at about $9 per user fixes ownership, governance, and support, none of which are the things people complain about, and it binds to a single Google Cloud project in a way that fits agencies poorly. Use it as the default starting point, price the connectors honestly before calling it free, and move to a purpose-built agency reporting tool when template maintenance starts costing more than a subscription.
Read the full Looker Studio profileSupermetrics
Supermetrics is infrastructure, and the right way to judge it is by the labour it removes rather than the features it lists. If your team currently loses days each month exporting from Meta, Google, LinkedIn, and GA4 into a template, €199 a month buys those days back and hands connector maintenance to someone else, with no data volume fees so your bill does not grow with your ad spend. The connector library is the deepest in the category and the company is the most established, which matters when a platform changes an API on a Friday. Two things to be clear about before buying: this does no attribution at all, so it faithfully reproduces the double-counted conversion numbers the ad platforms report, and the allowance structure around accounts per source and seats will push a small agency from €49 to €199 faster than the price list implies. Buy it as plumbing, pair it with an attribution tool if you need answers rather than numbers, and compare it directly against Databox if what you actually want is a dashboard.
Read the full Supermetrics profileLooker Studio profile last reviewed 2026-08-23; Supermetrics last reviewed 2026-08-22. Pricing is compiled from public sources and can change without notice. See our methodology.