Clode vs Looker Studio
Looker Studio is free, it is Google's own, and a template someone else built can be showing your Search Console data ten minutes from now. For a lot of readers that is the whole answer, and this page says so rather than talking you out of it. The one thing worth understanding before you choose either of us is that Looker Studio keeps no archive of its own. It draws whatever Search Console will hand it today, and holds that only as long as it takes to draw the chart.
Looker Studio keeps no archive of its own
If what you want is a shareable report of numbers you already understand, build it in Looker Studio: it does that well and it costs nothing, while anything of ours past one free site is paid. The structural difference is storage. Google's own documentation says the data "is not imported into Looker Studio except as needed to answer a specific request" and is "kept only temporarily" [1]. So a dashboard built three years ago shows the same ~16 months Search Console will serve today, and its window slides forward as the old months fall out of Google's. We copy those 16 months out of the API when you connect and keep appending. On a paid site the window is a rolling 24 months, about eight months deeper than Google's, with every page and every search inside it; a free site keeps the most recent 14 days and the rest is trimmed.
The second difference is upkeep. A Looker report is something a person builds and then owns, and every grouping, every ranked list of what moved and every calculated field in it stays that person's job. Here the screens ship with the product and new ones arrive with it. What stays yours is the configuration you feed them: your groupings, your tracked keywords, your sitemap.
Side by side
| Looker Studio | Clode | |
|---|---|---|
| How far back you can look | Partly: About 16 months, as far as Search Console serves. No archive of its own [1] | Does it better: 16 months copied on connection, then every day: 24 months kept on a paid site, 14 days on a free one |
| Setup | Does it as well: Pick the property, open a template. Minutes, and free | Does it as well: Sign in, pick the property, watch 16 months copy in |
| How fresh the numbers are | Does it as well: Search Console's 2-3 day lag, plus a connector refresh fixed at 12 hours [2] | Does it as well: The same 2-3 day lag, then one sync a day on either plan |
| Comparing two periods | Does it as well: Built in: a comparison range adds a change column to charts and tables | Does it as well: Built in, and it is the report: winners and losers, for queries and pages |
| Sorting by what moved most | Partly: The change column cannot be sorted; ranking by it means blending the source with itself | Does it better: The Changes page opens ranked by clicks won and lost; one click re-ranks by position |
| Being told something dropped | Partly: Chart alerts need the paid Pro tier [3]; free scheduling emails the report regardless | Does it better: Four week-over-week checks after every sync, said as a sentence in the app |
| Grouping pages or searches | Partly: Calculated fields written by hand, in each report | Does it better: Rules, a regex or your URL folders, saved once, then read by the pivots and keyword screens |
| Site totals vs page totals | Partly: Two separate tables; one data source can use only one of them [4] | Does it better: One model, every figure labelled with its window and source |
| Blending with Analytics, Ads or a spreadsheet | Does it better: Yes. This is the reason Looker Studio exists | Not at all: Search Console is the only performance data we read. The only other things we fetch are your robots.txt and sitemap, and only to reconcile them against the pages Google has actually seen |
| How the report looks | Does it better: Any chart, any layout, community visualizations, your own logo and colours | Partly: Screens we designed; you arrange the pivots, groups, sorting and comparison range |
| Who keeps it working | Partly: Whoever built it: a renamed field or a new question is theirs to fix | Does it better: We keep the reports working; your groupings, keywords and sitemap stay yours |
| Price | Does it better: Free. Pro, which is what adds alerts, is billed per user per Google Cloud project | Partly: One site free; paid is €10 a site a month, cheaper per site from 3 sites, and never more than €129 a month for the whole account |
| Showing a client | Does it as well: A shared report link, or a scheduled email of the report | Does it as well: A free viewer login that shows only that client's project |
| Getting the numbers into another tool | Does it as well: It is the other tool | Does it as well: CSV from the query, page and pivot reports, which Looker Studio reads as an uploaded file or a Google Sheet |
← Side by side →
Looker Studio details checked against Google's own documentation on 4 September 2026. It is Google's product, and Google changes it without telling us.
- [1] Data "is not imported into Looker Studio except as needed to answer a specific request" and is "kept only temporarily".
- [2] The Search Console connector refreshes every 12 hours, an interval listed as fixed for this connector.
- [3] Chart alerts are a Looker Studio Pro feature, billed per user per Google Cloud project.
- [4] Site totals and page totals are separate tables, and "a single data source can only use one of these".
Where they're better
Looker Studio is free, it is Google's own, and connecting a Search Console property takes a couple of clicks and no account with anybody new. It can put Search Console beside Analytics, Ads, a spreadsheet and a database in one report, joined on a shared field. We cannot do any of that, and if your real question spans more than search, that settles it on its own. It is also a genuine design surface: any chart type, community visualizations, your own colours and logo, and a link you can hand a client. Because templates exist, the first version costs nothing to try and nothing to throw away. If you need a monthly PDF of metrics you already understand, Looker Studio produces it for free and does not need us. And the two do not conflict. A Looker report and this product read the same read-only Google account, so keeping the dashboard costs you nothing either way.
vs Google Search Console
Search Console is where our data comes from. What we add on top: grouping, the full query list, ranked movers, alerts and 24 months of daily history.
Learn morevs the BigQuery bulk export
Google's free BigQuery export keeps data past 16 months, but it records only forward from setup day and never backfills. Side by side on setup and cost.
Learn morePricing
How many sites, how far back your history goes, and how many reports you save. Everything else is the same on both plans, and the price depends only on how many sites you connect.
See pricingConnect your site and see the first answer today
Sign in with Google, pick a property, and your dashboard fills in while you watch, with the screen counting the days as they land.