Power BI vs Looker Studio: Which Should a UK Small Business Use?

For most UK small businesses, Looker Studio is the better start if your data already lives in Google tools such as GA4, Google Ads, Search Console or Sheets, because it is free and sharing a report costs nothing. Power BI is the better choice if you run on Microsoft 365, Excel and SQL Server, or need heavier data modelling, but anyone who shares or views reports needs a paid licence, from £10.80 per user per month.

Power BI vs Looker Studio at a glance

How much does Power BI cost in the UK?

Power BI Pro costs £10.80 per user per month and Premium Per User costs £18.50 per user per month, both billed yearly and excluding VAT (Microsoft UK pricing). Power BI Pro is included in Microsoft 365 E5, so some larger businesses already have it.

The free Power BI licence lets one person build reports for themselves, but not share them. As soon as a report is shared, both the person publishing it and the people viewing it need a Pro or Premium Per User licence, unless the business pays for dedicated capacity. For a team of ten who all need to see the same dashboard, that is £1,296 a year on Pro before VAT.

How much does Looker Studio cost?

Looker Studio is free. You can build reports, connect Google data sources and share them with as many people as you like at no cost. Looker Studio Pro adds team workspaces, organisation-level ownership of reports and Google Cloud support for $9 per user per month. Some third-party connectors, for example ones that pull in Facebook Ads or Xero data, carry their own subscription fees, which is where the real cost of a Looker Studio setup usually sits.

What does each cost for a team of ten?

For a business where ten people need to see the same reports, the licence cost over one year looks like this, before VAT and before any third-party connectors:

Licences are rarely the biggest cost. Setting up the data sources, cleaning the data and designing reports people actually use takes far more time than either tool costs, and that work is largely the same whichever tool you pick. The licence difference matters most when the audience is large: sharing a Looker Studio report with fifty franchisees or clients costs nothing, while the same audience on Power BI Pro would cost £6,480 a year.

Which is easier to learn?

Looker Studio is easier to start with. It runs in a browser, the editor works like a slide tool and a simple GA4 report can be built in an afternoon. Power BI asks more of you up front: building happens mainly in Power BI Desktop, which runs on Windows, and getting the best from it means learning how tables relate to each other and writing measures in DAX, Microsoft's formula language. That extra effort pays off once reports draw on several systems, but it is a real cost for a small team with nobody technical.

Which handles business data better?

Power BI handles complex business data better. It is built around a proper data model: you load several tables, define how they relate (customers to orders, orders to products, products to suppliers) and then any chart can slice across all of them. Looker Studio can blend data sources, but blending is limited and gets slow and fragile as reports grow. If your reporting needs to join finance, stock and sales data from different systems, Power BI is the more dependable tool.

Looker Studio is stronger for Google marketing data. Its native connectors for GA4, Google Ads, Search Console and BigQuery are free, maintained by Google and quick to set up, while getting the same data into Power BI usually means extra connectors or an export step.

How often does the data refresh?

In Power BI, imported datasets on a Pro licence can refresh up to 8 times a day on a schedule, and up to 48 times a day on Premium Per User (Microsoft Learn). DirectQuery connections can show live data instead, at the cost of slower reports. In Looker Studio, Google connectors fetch data when the report is viewed, with a cache you can set for each data source, so GA4 and Ads reports are usually close to live without any scheduling.

Which should a UK small business choose?

Choose Looker Studio if:

• Most of your data is in GA4, Google Ads, Search Console or Google Sheets.

• You need to share reports with clients, a board or staff without paying per viewer.

• Your reporting is mainly marketing, website and lead performance.

Choose Power BI if:

• Your business already runs on Microsoft 365, Excel, SharePoint or SQL Server.

• Reports need to join data from several business systems, such as accounts, stock and sales.

• The people who view reports are a small, known group, so per-user licences stay affordable.

Plenty of businesses end up using both: Looker Studio for marketing reports shared widely, and Power BI for finance and operations reports seen by a few people.

What about a custom dashboard instead?

A custom dashboard built into your own web application makes sense when the dashboard is part of your product, when customers need to log in and see their own data, or when per-user licences would cost more over three years than building it once. Koseti builds custom dashboards in Laravel for exactly those cases, and builds Power BI and Looker Studio reporting for everything else. The right answer depends on who views the reports and where the data lives, not on which tool looks more impressive.

How Koseti approaches a reporting project

1. Start with the questions. List the ten decisions the dashboard should help someone make, and the numbers each one needs.

2. Map the data. Find where each number lives, how clean it is and how often it changes.

3. Choose the tool last. Pick Looker Studio, Power BI or a custom build based on the sources, the audience and the licence cost.

4. Build one page that gets used. Ship a single page people open every week before adding more.

See data analytics and BI for how Koseti scopes dashboard work, or the Middlesbrough data analytics page if you are based in Teesside.

Frequently asked questions

Is Looker Studio really free?

Yes. Building and sharing reports in Looker Studio is free. You may pay for Looker Studio Pro at $9 per user per month, or for third-party connectors that bring in non-Google data.

Can I share a Power BI report for free?

Not with the free licence. Publishing to the web makes a report public to anyone with the link, which is rarely right for business data. Private sharing needs Pro or Premium Per User licences for the people involved.

Does Power BI work on a Mac?

Power BI Desktop runs on Windows only. Mac users can view and edit some reports in the Power BI web service, or run Desktop in a Windows virtual machine.

Can Looker Studio connect to Excel?

Yes, by uploading a file or by moving the spreadsheet into Google Sheets. It does not stay connected to a live Excel file the way Power BI can.

Is Looker Studio the same as Looker?

No. Looker is Google Cloud's separate enterprise BI platform with its own pricing. Looker Studio, formerly Google Data Studio, is the free reporting tool covered here.