Open Report › Alternatives › Looker Studio
The self-hosted alternative to Looker Studio
Looker Studio is free and starts in seconds, which is genuinely hard to beat. What it cannot do is run anywhere but Google’s infrastructure. So if your data may not leave your servers, or you need the reporting layer to outlive a product decision made elsewhere, no setting will get you there. That is the gap Open Report fills.
Side by side
| Open Report | Looker Studio | |
|---|---|---|
| Licence | GNU AGPL-3.0. Source readable and forkable | Proprietary, Google |
| Where it runs | Your servers, or a hosted Cloud in France | Google’s infrastructure only |
| Where your data sits | In your own databases; the SQL runs from your server | Queried and cached by the service |
| Self-hosting | Yes, by default | Not available |
| Pricing model | Free when self-hosted, whatever the number of readers | Free tier, paid Pro tier per user |
| Row-level security | Defined once on the model, applied to every report | Depends on the data source |
| Can you read the source? | Yes | No |
Where Looker Studio is stronger
No tool wins everywhere, and a comparison that pretends otherwise is not worth reading.
- It is free, and there is nothing to install or operate. No server, no updates, no backups.
- Its connectors to the Google world (BigQuery, Analytics, Sheets, Ads) are first-party and excellent.
- Sharing works like a Google Doc. Everyone already knows how.
- A large gallery of community templates to start from.
Where Open Report fits better
- Your data stays put. So do the database credentials.
- A semantic model: dimensions, measures and row-level security defined once, then reused by every report built on it.
- Reports are laid out on a real canvas: multi-page, pixel positioning, merged frames. They can be scheduled out as PDF by email.
- It runs on PostgreSQL, MySQL, Azure SQL and DuckDB as naturally as on BigQuery.
Try it yourself
Self-hosting takes one command from a fresh clone. The installer checks your Node version and installs it if needed. Or open the hosted app and skip the server entirely.