The data visualization tool Google Data Studio has been renamed Looker Studio. Many of the functionalities remain, however through the announcement of the Looker Studio Pro tier, some functions will certainly be subject to a subscription fee.
Google itself writes about the rebranding: “Data Studio is now Looker Studio. With this complete enterprise business intelligence suite, we’re helping you go beyond dashboards and empower your workflows and applications with the intelligence you need to make data-driven decisions.”
How did the rebranding come about?
Looker, the business intelligence software and analytics platform, was acquired by Google at the beginning of 2020. Since which, Google has gathered all of its business intelligence products to fit into one packaged offering called Looker Studio. Google Data Studio is included as part of this new suite.
What’s changing with the new Looker Studio?
The features on Google Data Studio that were free of charge, will remain so for the time being. Looker Studio Pro, the subscription tier, on the other hand will have new features on enterprise management, team collaboration and service level agreement integration. A roadmap for Looker Studio and Looker Studio Pro is currently in development, and some points are already public.
What happens to our Google Data Studio dashboards?
Your existing dashboards, in theory, can be edited and used as usual. Nonetheless, we have noticed strange phenomena with some of our reports, such as spontaneously disconnected data sources, for which we have not yet been able to determine the cause. It is quite possible that the rebranding will present some bugs and affect existing dashboards however we don’t anticipate any major issues long term.
We will keep you updated on the Looker Roadmap and if you find any inconsistencies in your dashboard, we are here to support you in fixing them.
