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SendTidings vs Looker Studio (now Data Studio).

One is free and ubiquitous. The other costs £29 a month and does the whole client-reporting job for you. Here’s when each makes sense, including an honest case for when free wins.

Pick Data Studio (formerly Looker Studio) if

You’re happy to build, brand, and maintain a dashboard per client, and you actually do. You enjoy DIY tooling, your stack is mostly Google (Analytics, Ads, Sheets, BigQuery), and your clients are comfortable opening a link to view live data.

Pick SendTidings if

You want the whole thing to arrive, not be built: a live, white-labelled client dashboard and the plain monthly letter, set up in minutes per client. You’d rather pay £29 a month than spend two hours per client building a custom dashboard you then have to babysit when something changes.

Side by side

Where the two diverge.

  SendTidings Data Studio
Price £0 (1 site), £29/mo (20) Free
Primary surface Live dashboard + branded monthly email Dashboard URL
Setup per client ~5 minutes 1-3 hours per dashboard (then re-styling)
Email delivery on a schedule Native (the product) Yes, but as a PDF attachment
Mobile rendering Designed for it Variable — PDF on mobile is rough
Multi-client tenancy Yes (org → clients → sites) No — each client is a separate file
White-label sender Starter and above Scheduled, but from a Google address, not your domain
Integrations Plausible, GA4, Matomo, Cloudflare GA4, Google products + 800+ partner connectors
Open-source self-host Planned (AGPL-3.0) No (Google-hosted only)
The different angle

DIY tooling vs done-for-you tooling.

Data Studio is a serious piece of software. It’s free, has deep Google ecosystem connectivity, and lets you build whatever you can imagine. The trade-off is that it’s a tool, not a product. You bring the design, the layout, the branding, the per-client setup, the maintenance. Every new client is hours of work before the first report goes out.

SendTidings is a product. Every client gets a live, white-labelled dashboard behind a secure magic link (no login to chase), and the plain monthly letter still lands in their inbox. It tracks real outcomes, not just traffic, and lets clients watch measurable goals as live progress bars. You set a client up in minutes, however many you have. The trade-off the other way: you don’t get to redesign it from scratch.

If you have one client and an evening to spare, Data Studio is a legitimate free option. If you have five clients and don’t want to spend the next five evenings building dashboards, the £29 a month tends to pay for itself in the first hour.

When Data Studio wins

Free really is free here.

  • You have one or two clients. The setup time amortises differently when it’s a one-off. Spending two evenings making a beautiful Data Studio dashboard is fine if it only ever happens twice.
  • You’re deep in Google’s stack. GA4, Ads, Sheets, BigQuery: Data Studio integrates with them better than anything else.
  • You enjoy DIY tooling. Some agencies prefer the control. Data Studio gives you it.
  • Budget is hard zero. A small fee is a real barrier; we get it.
When SendTidings wins

The time you save is the value.

  • You have more than two clients. Per-client dashboard setup compounds. Multi-tenancy out of the box matters.
  • You want the report to be email, not a PDF. Native inbox-rendering — not an attachment your client won’t open.
  • You don’t want to maintain dashboards. Data Studio breaks quietly when an integration changes upstream. SendTidings is one less thing to fix at 11pm.
  • Your analytics isn’t all Google. Plausible, Matomo, Cloudflare: Data Studio can do some of these via connectors, with varying quality. SendTidings ships native support for each.
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