Is Looker Studio Pro Worth It? Full Review and Feature Breakdown

If you use Looker Studio to build marketing or business dashboards, you might be wondering:
What’s the difference with Looker Studio Pro? And should I upgrade?

I recently tested Looker Studio Pro — starting with the free 30-day trial — and in this article I’ll share what actually changes, which features are useful (or not), and how the new Gemini AI tool can help you work with data faster — even if you’re not a data analyst.

Let’s dive in.

What Changes When You Switch to Looker Studio Pro?

As soon as I activated the trial, I saw a few new things:

A “Pro Subscription” section in the admin panel
A new workspace called “Owned by Me” — great for creating private or team reports
Reports are now owned by your company, not by the person who created them (super helpful if someone leaves your team)
You can invite teammates and manage access more easily

This already makes Pro useful for teams.

Sharing Just Got Easier

You can now share dashboards using personal report links.
That means your client or colleague can explore a version of the report — change filters, date ranges, etc. — without touching the original file. This is especially helpful for agencies or anyone working with clients.

What About Report Delivery?

One thing that’s supposed to work in Pro is scheduling more report deliveries. Google says you can create up to 20 delivery schedules per report, but when I tested it — something didn’t work.

To be fair, the issue may be that I created the dashboard before upgrading. I’ll do more tests and post an update in a separate video.

Testing the Coolest Feature: Gemini AI

This is the part that really impressed me.

Looker Studio Pro includes Gemini, an AI assistant that lets you talk to your data.

You can connect BigQuery or Google Sheets, then just ask questions like:

“How many clicks did I get in April?”
“What’s the most popular search query for my site?”

Gemini answers with both text and a full SQL query — ready to run.
Even better: you don’t need to write any code yourself.

This makes data analysis accessible to marketers, content teams, and business owners — not just data analysts.

I even tested it with Google Search Console data in BigQuery, and it worked really well.

Other Features I’ll Test Soon

There are more features I haven’t tested yet, like:

Looker Studio mobile app — could be useful for checking KPIs on the go
Custom Gemini agents — you can personalize how Gemini answers your data questions

I’ll cover these in future videos.

Final Thoughts: Is Looker Studio Pro Worth It?

For $9/month per user, I think it’s totally worth it — especially if:

You work in a team
You build a lot of dashboards
You want better control, collaboration, and automation
You like the idea of using AI instead of writing SQL

Some features are still a bit rough (like the delivery schedule), but Gemini alone is already a big win.

Want to Go Deeper?

If you liked this article, here are more useful posts for you:

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