Here is where Adobe Analysis Workspace really shines, since it allows you to apply an unlimited number of user segments to any report. The Segment Comparison (Segment IQ) Tool discovers the most statistically significant differences among an unlimited number of segments. It also automatically uncovers the key characteristics of the audience segments and lets you see to what degree any segments overlap.
It is super easy to create or apply segments in Analysis Workspace. Moreover, you can create instant segments by dropping any component type (dimension, dimension item, event, metric, segment, date range) into the segment drop zone at the top of a panel.
Google Advanced Analysis also allows you to compare segments, but in a much more limited way compared to Adobe Analysis Workspace. Its segment overlap tool uses Venn-style diagrams and lets you compare up to three user segments to quickly see how those segments overlap and relate to each other. You can use this tool to identify new segments of users who meet complex criteria.
There is also a limitation of 10 segments per analysis, and currently you can import existing segments, but you cannot create a new segment directly from the user interface.
Data drill-down
Here is also where Google Advanced Analysis gets left behind, since it only allows you to drill down up to five dimensions.
In the meantime, Adobe Analysis Workspace allows up to 200 breakdowns per table. You can break down a dimension by another dimension, a segment, or even a specific time.
Data export and sharing
Data export is one of the most significant weaknesses of Adobe Analysis Workspace. It is possible to download the reports in CSV or PDF. However, you can only download up to the first 50 rows of data every time. Fortunately, Workspace has a nice feature called Curation, with which you can limit the components before sharing a project. As a result, you can share a project and its components with marketers and other non-analysts in your business.
Google Advanced Analysis is much more versatile and supports full report downloading in Google Sheet, CSV, and TSV. However, there is currently no obvious way to share these reports with other users from the interface.
Ease of use
Still in beta mode, the user interface of Google Advanced Analysis is not as polished as that of Adobe Analysis Workspace. You can only choose from three existing templates—Explorations, Funnels, and Segment Overlap—to facilitate the analysis of your data.
Adobe Analysis Workspace has been out much longer and provides nearly 20 pre-built templates for common business questions.
It also includes many more visualization styles (Table, Line, Bar, Area, Treemap, Pie…) than the meager choices of bar charts, pie charts, and line charts in Google Advanced Analysis.
With diverse layout options, interactive visualization and on-the-fly segment and calculated metric creation, Adobe Analysis Workspace provides a much better user experience than Google Advanced Analysis, but please keep in mind that Google Advanced Analysis is still in its infancy.
Verdict
In conclusion, Google Advanced Analysis is a big step up from GA 360’s basic reporting capability. However, it still needs to improve a lot more in order to match the data slicing-and-dicing capabilities of Adobe Analysis Workspace.
Comparison Table (as of May 2018)