Power BI vs Looker Studio for a small business dashboard

Short answer. Looker Studio is the fastest way to a shareable dashboard if your data lives in Google tools, ad accounts and spreadsheets — and it is free to start. Power BI is stronger when you combine many sources, need serious calculations like margin by product after all costs, or work in a Microsoft environment. For many small businesses the deciding factor is not the tool but how clean the source data is.

Side by side

	Looker Studio	Power BI
Cost to start	Free	Free desktop; sharing needs licences
Best with	Google Ads, Analytics, Sheets, BigQuery	Many sources, Excel, SQL, Microsoft 365
Calculations	Basic to moderate	Advanced data modelling
Sharing	Like a Google Doc	Through the Power BI service
Learning curve	Low	Medium to high

Pick Looker Studio if

Marketing reporting is the main goal.
Your data is mostly in Google products and spreadsheets.
You want a working dashboard this week.

Pick Power BI if

You combine CRM, accounting, e-commerce and spreadsheets.
You need margin, cohorts or other non-trivial calculations.
Your company already uses Microsoft 365.

Before choosing a tool, write down the five numbers the dashboard must show and where each comes from. That list decides more than any feature comparison.

We build in both — see Analytics dashboards.

Tell us about your project

Describe what you have now and what you want to achieve. We will review your setup, name the root cause and propose a plan in writing before any work starts.