Google Data Studio

I love how easy it is to put the data points into different graphs and visualizations. The UI is typical of Google. Super intuitive and user-friendly and most aspects of the product behave exactly as a user would expect (which isn't the case in my experience for softwares like Tableau). Ease of use is by far what makes Google Data Studio stand out among the crowd.

Can be hard to integrate data with certain platforms if they aren't Google owned platforms. There's also minor functionality gaps around not having all of the relevant google ads dimensions and labels accessible within data studio.

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.