What Looker Studio does well
Google now calls Looker Studio “Data Studio” (Google Cloud documentation). Most people still search for the old name, so we use it here.
It costs nothing to build or view reports. Google says Data Studio “is available at no charge for creators and report viewers” (Google Cloud). It connects directly to more than 1,400 data sources, including Google Sheets, Google Ads, BigQuery and Google Analytics, and reports can have filters, multiple pages and embeds on any web page (Google Cloud).
The paid tier, Data Studio Pro, is listed at US$9 per user per project per month (Google Cloud). It adds team workspaces, reports owned by your organisation rather than the person who made them, and access to Google Cloud Customer Care (Google Cloud documentation).
Who should stay on Looker Studio
If most of your reporting data already lives in Google products, someone on your team enjoys building reports, and the reports you need don’t change much from month to month, Looker Studio is hard to beat on price.
Where it gets harder for nonprofits
Google’s own connectors cover Google’s marketing products, databases, spreadsheets and CSV uploads (Google Cloud documentation). Fundraising platforms, CRMs and accounting software aren’t on that list. For those, Data Studio relies on community connectors, an open-source program that “allows anyone to build their own connections” (Google Cloud documentation), or on a spreadsheet that someone updates by hand.
In a lot of nonprofits that someone is the data or CRM person, who also builds the reports, fixes them when a field changes and answers the follow-up questions after the board meeting. That is the job Filament is designed to take some weight off.
Where Filament is different
Filament connects the systems a nonprofit already runs, such as Raisely, Salesforce, eTapestry, Xero, Mailchimp and Google Analytics 4. The data lands in a dedicated PostgreSQL warehouse for your organisation, isolated from other customers. You can choose to keep it in Australia, the EU or the US. Platform data and some processing may be outside that region.
Instead of building each chart by hand, you ask for a dashboard or a number in plain English. Answers show their working: the methodology and the SQL, which you can edit. You can teach Filament your definitions once, such as what counts as a regular giver, and it carries them into later questions. When something looks odd, a Thread lets you ask follow-up questions against the same data.
Dashboards turn into board-ready PDF reports, or you can share a live dashboard with colleagues using permissions. You can go from first connection to first insight in under an hour.
You don’t have to switch everything at once
Filament connects to Google Sheets and BigQuery, and you can embed an existing Looker Studio report in a Filament dashboard using a Markdown chart and the iframe builder. A sensible first step is to move the one report that takes longest each month.
Sources
All checked 26 October 2026.
