Hey Mike Sumner, thanks for the response and your opinion! It sounds like you have some great experience in the BI space. You make good points in favour of Tableau and I’d like to respond with a little of my perspective as to why I still believe DataStudio has strong use-cases.
“It has no data governance”
Data governance is a broad topic, and I agree that DataStudio doesn’t do everything, but there’s nothing stopping you from building out data governance parts around DataStudio as and when you need to. For example, we perform daily checks on our data for quality assurance before passing it on to DataStudio. We also document all our data sources and main reports in a centralised place so that everyone can access and see what is available. There is more to data governance than just that and Tableau does have more built-in, but for small- to medium-sized companies, I believe it’s possible to achieve a good setup with DataStudio as a central part of the data ecosystem.
“No proper permissions management”
As mentioned, I believe the sharing permissions to users is very clear through the use of Google’s IAM. This is consistent across Google products and many people are now accustomed to this process through Google’s suite of office products. I’ll assume you’re referring to the data management aspect which I would agree is less clear.
Within the data team, it’s necessary to keep documentation of data sources and share them accordingly which I imagine could become unwieldy for large companies. As mentioned above, I’ve worked in smaller data teams where this hasn’t been a problem but I think you’re right in that DataStudio still has ways to go before it can become a product for larger organisations with complex data requirements.
“Outside of Google marketing products its connections are awful”
Personally, I have used DataStudio with BigQuery, Postgres and Google Sheets; all of which haven’t required hoop jumping on my end (except for proper date recognition…). On top of these, Supermetrics has created quite a few connectors to integrate with other sources such as Instagram, LinkedIn and MailChimp.
Certainly, if I fire up Tableau I can see more options, but it comes back to what the majority of organisations actually use and in many cases, this will be covered by DataStudio’s current connectors.
