Power BI or Looker Studio, now Data Studio: what each costs a small business, and who needs a licence

Google renamed Looker Studio on 16 April 2026. Its release notes say "We've rebranded Looker Studio as Data Studio", and its welcome page calls the change a return to the product's original name. Existing reports carry on: Google says they need no update, and lookerstudio.google.com redirects to the new address, datastudio.google.com. This article uses Data Studio, the name on Google's pages now.

As each maker's page showed them in October 2026. Microsoft's are from its Irish page: per user a month, paid yearly, before VAT. Google's page shows Data Studio Pro in US dollars only, so it is given in dollars, and says the price per user varies with the length of the subscription.

Power BI first. Microsoft's page on licence types says people with a free licence can create reports and dashboards for their own use, and cannot use Power BI's sharing features. To share, you need Pro or Premium Per User. The people you share with need Pro or Premium Per User too, unless the content is in a Premium or Fabric capacity, and only Premium capacities and Fabric capacities of F64 or larger let people on a free licence open shared content. Content shared from Premium Per User can be opened only by other Premium Per User users, unless it is saved in a Premium capacity.

Power BI can also publish a report to the open web. Microsoft's warning is that Publish to web makes reports "publicly accessible on the internet without authentication, including all underlying data in the semantic model".

Two things to check before buying. Power BI needs a work or school email address: Microsoft says consumer accounts such as Gmail or Hotmail cannot be used directly. And some Microsoft 365 plans already include Pro: the Irish pricing page names Microsoft 365 E5 and Office 365 E5.

Data Studio is free for the people who build reports and the people who view them. A report can be shared with named people or Google Groups, or by link with anyone in your organisation or on the web, "even if they don't have a Google account", in Google's words. Editing always needs a Google account.

Data Studio Pro is a self-service upgrade for organisations on Google Workspace or Cloud Identity, billed monthly for every licence in the subscription, used or not. Each person who creates, edits or manages content in Pro workspaces needs a licence; Google says people who only view Pro reports need none.

What changes when someone leaves is who owns the reports. Google says no-cost content "is owned by the individual user who created it", and Pro content is owned by your organisation through a Google Cloud project.

In Power BI, refreshing data typically means importing it into a model, on a schedule or on demand. Microsoft allows up to 8 scheduled refreshes a day on Pro, and up to 48 on Premium Per User. On shared capacity a refresh has to finish in less than two hours. Microsoft pauses a schedule after two months in which nobody opens a report built on the data, and switches it off after four failures in a row.

An Excel workbook kept in OneDrive or SharePoint Online is handled differently: by default, Power BI checks about every hour whether the file has changed.

Data Studio queries the source when a report needs data, and keeps answers in memory so that a report's data is never older than its data freshness setting. Google's defaults are every 12 hours for Google Analytics, every 12 hours for Google Ads and its other ad and measurement products, and every 15 minutes for Google Sheets. An editor can refresh a report at any time.

From each maker's connector documentation, read in October 2026, for four sources: Google Analytics 4, Google Ads, Excel and SharePoint. The gaps are on the other maker's side: Power BI has no Microsoft connector for Google Ads, and Data Studio has no Google connector for SharePoint.

From what each maker publishes, in short:

Both draw the figures they are given. Neither decides what counts as an enquiry, and Google's own help says Google Analytics will be missing data for visitors who decline consent. What you can measure without consent sets out what is left when a visitor says no.

An ad platform's conversion count can also fall short of the sales in your own books, for the reasons server-side conversion tracking explains. Compare the two for the same month before a dashboard is built on either. For the cost side, what Google Ads costs in Ireland has the top-of-page bids for sixty Irish searches, read in October 2026.