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 — that is the 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, which everybody already understands.
- A large gallery of community templates to start from.
Where Open Report fits better
- Your data stays on your infrastructure, and so do the credentials of the databases it reads.
- 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 — and 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.