Qrly vs Google Data Studio
Qrly is the self-hostable BI + AI platform Looker Studio cannot be — Looker Studio (formerly Google Data Studio) has no AI Ask, no self-hosting, and needs a Google account for everyone who opens a report. Qrly ships natural-language Ask (NL→SQL), AI anomaly detection and BYO LLM (local Ollama / LM Studio or cloud Claude, Gemini, OpenAI, Azure) on your own infra, with embedded analytics via signed-JWT and flat pricing for unlimited users.
Who wins where
Looker Studio is free, genuinely good at what it does, and almost certainly has more reports built in it than every paid BI tool combined. The Qrly pitch is depth, governance and where your data lives — not that Looker Studio is bad. The decision usually comes down to those three axes rather than to who draws the nicer bar chart.
BI + AI in one self-hosted platform — flat pricing
- AI Ask (NL→SQL) with AI anomaly detection & performance analyzer
- BYO LLM — local Ollama / LM Studio or cloud Claude, Gemini, OpenAI, Azure
- Embedded analytics with signed-JWT and locked parameters per viewer
- Self-hostable on your own infra — no GCP lock-in
- QQL across 12+ database dialects, OLAP star/snowflake models
- Multi-tenant tenants, projects and collections, OIDC SSO, EU data residency
- Flat license for unlimited users
Charts, dashboards and scheduled delivery
- Both build charts and dashboards over live data
- Both embed a report inside another web page
- Both offer calculated fields over the source data
- Both email a scheduled report on a fixed cadence
- Both share read-only views with people who cannot edit
Free, and unbeatable on Google sources
- Free at the core — no licence anyone has to justify
- First-party connectors for Analytics, Ads and Search Console
- A large partner-connector catalogue for SaaS sources
- Sharing that behaves exactly like a Google Doc
- A deep gallery of ready-made report templates
Feature-by-feature comparison
The features most teams actually evaluate when switching from Google Data Studio.
| Feature | RecommendedQrlySelf-hosted · Belgium | Google Data StudioGoogle |
|---|---|---|
| Self-hostable on your own infra | Included | SaaS only, no on-prem |
| First query without building a model first | Included | No modelling layer |
| Signed-JWT embedding with locked parameters | Included | Iframe embed, report-level sharing |
| Alerts, anomaly detection and root-cause agent | Included | Scheduled delivery, no threshold alerts |
| Scheduled subscriptions (PDF, CSV, inline) | Included | Scheduled email |
| Visual query builder and raw SQL, round-trip convertible | SQL ⇄ visual | Calculated fields only |
| Azure AD + Google + LDAP + Basic simultaneously | Included | Google Sign-In only |
| OIDC SSO user provisioning | Included | Google Workspace accounts only |
| AI with on-prem option (Ollama, LM Studio) | Included | Cloud only, no local model |
| Multi-tenant architecture out of the box | Included | No tenant isolation |
| Connects to your existing warehouse on day 1 | 40 connection types | Connector catalogue |
| Flat pricing (unlimited users) | Included | Free; Pro is a paid per-user add-on |
| Productive in under 5 minutes | Included | Included |
| EU data residency (native, not a tier) | Included | Google-managed, region not selectable |
| No marketplace plugin required for basics | Included | Partner connectors, mostly paid |
| Dashboards, charts and scheduled reports | Included | Included |
| REST API + webhooks | Included | Included |
| Pivot tables and multi-level rollups | Included | Pivot tables, no rollup or cube |
| Markdown analysis documents included | Analysis reports | Text boxes on the report canvas |
Four reasons teams leave Google Data Studio
From real migration conversations with data and IT leaders deciding whether Looker Studio can still carry reporting that has outgrown it.
A report builder, not a BI platform
Looker Studio draws charts on top of a connector, and that is the whole architecture. There is nowhere to put a metric definition, nothing to mark as reviewed, and no query anyone else can reuse — so the same calculation gets re-typed as a calculated field in the fourth report, subtly differently, and two dashboards start disagreeing about revenue. The tool is not at fault; it was never designed to be the place a definition lives.
Qrly is built the other way round. A saved question is a reusable object other questions reference as a view, with cycle detection and a bounded nesting depth. Above it sit OLAP models with a measure catalogue, named hierarchies and always-applied model filters. Around it sit a verified-question badge with its own audit log and a lineage graph that shows which dashboards a table actually feeds.
There is no self-hosted Looker Studio
Not at any price, not in any tier. Reports, cached extracts and the credentials that reach your database all sit in Google's estate, and every person who opens a report needs a Google account. For defence contractors, hospitals, municipalities, smaller banks and research institutes, that is not a preference to be negotiated — it is the sentence in the regulator's letter.
Qrly self-hosts on any Linux box or Kubernetes cluster with no user floor and no minimum spend. Air-gapped installs are supported. A 40-person internal team runs the same binary a 4,000-person enterprise runs, on the same licence terms, with the data never leaving the perimeter.
AI you do not get to run yourself
Whatever assistance Looker Studio offers runs in Google's cloud, on Google's terms, with your schema and your prompts crossing the boundary to get there. For teams holding customer PII, health records or regulated financial data, that is not a procurement debate — it closes the door on the feature set entirely, and the answer is to switch it off rather than to configure it.
Qrly points at Ollama or LM Studio on your own hardware, or at any OpenAI-compatible endpoint you control. Natural-language Ask that compiles to SQL, generated schema and column descriptions, result narration, anomaly explanations — all inside your network. The agent layer is off by default, every write is staged as a proposal for approval, and the published MCP surface is read-only.
Speed is whatever the connector decided
A Looker Studio report is only as quick as the connector behind it, and you have almost no levers. A report over a large spreadsheet or a third-party partner connector is slow in a way no amount of chart tuning fixes, and the usual advice — extract the data and refresh it on a schedule — trades freshness for speed rather than solving anything.
Qrly gives you the levers. Four opt-in caching tiers, per-question result materialisation on a refresh interval, per-connection query timeouts, row caps, concurrency and queue limits, a per-user daily query budget and a query governor. Large results stream as NDJSON with a cancel that genuinely aborts the request, and every question carries an EXPLAIN plan and a performance analyser that ranks its findings before you ask an LLM anything.
Pricing, honestly
Our own list price in full, and an honest account of how Google prices Looker Studio. The Qrly column is the published schedule evaluated at €15M of revenue — the number of people using it does not move it.
Methodology, 28 August 2026. Qrly publishes a complete rate card, so the figures in our column are quoted exactly. The other column describes a pricing model rather than quoting a number: vendor list prices change without notice and several of these vendors do not publish one at all. For current figures, go to the vendor’s own pricing page.
Qrly
Annual licence · priced on your revenue · unlimited users, one organisation, one installation
- Annual licence at €15M revenue €6,300
- Per analyst / per viewer €0
- Per query, per credit, per capacity unit €0
- Embedded dashboard consumers €0
- Embedding, alerts, OIDC/SSO, row-level rules Included at every tier
- Self-hosting and bring-your-own LLM Included at every tier
Three years of licence: €18,900
That is our published schedule evaluated at €15M of revenue — 0.18% of the first €500k, then 0.12%, 0.0525% and 0.027% on each tranche above it. It does not move when you add users. The whole rate card, from the €900 floor upward, is on the pricing page.
Looker Studio
Free product · Looker Studio Pro is a paid add-on · formerly Google Data Studio
- Looker Studio Free
- Looker Studio Pro Paid add-on — per user, per project, per month
- What Pro adds Team workspaces, Google Cloud support, admin controls
- Deployment Google-hosted only — there is nothing to self-host
- Where the bill actually lands BigQuery: bytes scanned on every report refresh
- List price Published by Google — check cloud.google.com/looker-studio/pricing
The licence is not where Looker Studio costs money, and any comparison pretending otherwise is dishonest — the base product is free. The bill arrives from the warehouse underneath: every viewer opening every report is another BigQuery scan, and that meter answers to your users’ curiosity, not to your turnover. Qrly’s licence is fixed and its queries run against a database you already pay for.
Moving from Google Data Studio to Qrly
Most Looker Studio estates are rebuilt on Qrly inside a working week.
The standard migration path
There is no Looker Studio export a tool can ingest, and nobody sells one. That matters less than it sounds: the report is a view, and the data was always somewhere else. Qrly connects to the same BigQuery, Cloud SQL, Postgres or MySQL the report was already reading, and the report itself is rebuilt in the visual builder.
- Inventory the reports first. Every Looker Studio estate has a long tail nobody has opened in a year. Note each report's data source and last view date, and rebuild the ones that survive that question.
- Connect the source directly. BigQuery, Cloud SQL, Postgres, MySQL, SQL Server, Snowflake, Redshift — one of 40 connection types, read-only credentials, schema introspected on the first sync.
- Rebuild pages as questions and dashboards. Each chart becomes a saved question; each report page becomes a dashboard with cascade filters. Calculated fields carry over as Qrly calculated fields — SQL expressions with a type hint, validated on the server.
- Replace blends with joins. A blend lives inside the report that owns it. In Qrly the join is part of the query document — LEFT, INNER, RIGHT or FULL, against a table or another saved question — so the next report points at it instead of redoing it.
- Cut over the audience. Scheduled email delivery becomes a Qrly subscription in PDF, CSV or inline form; externally shared reports become signed-JWT embeds with locked parameters. Leave Looker Studio in place for a fortnight while people adjust.
Common questions
Can Qrly really replace Google Data Studio?
What about the Google Analytics and Google Ads connectors?
What replaces a Looker Studio blend?
Can Qrly import my Google Data Studio data?
Can I embed Qrly dashboards in my own application?
What does Qrly cost compared with Looker Studio?
The full alternatives matrix
Evaluating Qrly against another tool? Jump to the detailed side-by-side.