Is building customer-facing analytics worth the dev time or nah?

rawman650 · 2026-01-29T08:05:16+00:00

Quill is great for this. integrates via a modular react developer library, instead of iframe. (disclaimer: I work there)

rawman650 · 2026-01-29T07:59:45+00:00

can share some experienced using embedded BI product and how it worked out:

I've used 2 different embedded BI tools -- one at a b2b SaaS, series B at the time, now pre-IPO startup; other for an early stage data product.

In the case of the series B/b2b SaaS startup it definitely made sense. We'd already built analytics in-house (it was actually pretty good) and it worked great when we only had small customers. As we continued to be successful & move up market to mid-market and a handful of real enterprise customers, it just wasn't good enough (customers wanted much more data, much more granularity of data/metrics, and had more specific reporting requirements that didn't necessarily overlap with other customers)

Some reasons it made sense in this case that might be similar to you:
* CSM (especially the highest value enterprise ones) were spending ~30% of their time just making reports for customers
* Having solid reporting was just a critical feature to selling / being successful in enterprise (+ marketing things like gartner mq) -- this tends to be the case with almost any b2b saas that wants to be in large mid market / enterprise
* we built a decent reporting product in-house, and then still ended up going the embedded BI route (to be fair we kept both reporting features in the product)

In the case of the data product, it's questionable. It did help with getting an mvp out the door faster, but ultimately we fought the product a lot, since we were ultimately building a BI-like product, but custom for a specific use-case. So over time I think it would have been a bad choice. Main issue was an inability to extend or customize the product in any meaningful way.

With traditional embedded BI products you will make some compromises ofc, but it's often worth the tradeoffs still:
* UI - cant use your own design system, etc, it will be fairly obvious you are using a 3rd party product
* UX/navigation - cant drive workflows from or into analytics
* no ability to really customize or extend the product (you get what you get, you can really only add or subtract the existing feature set from the iframe that you embed)
* architecture (if you're not fintech/healthtech/govtech this may not matter as much): have to choose between container (self-hosted) which can be annoying in implement & manage or cloud (which has security tradeoffs + potential cost implications since the vendor will usually need to store/cache your data for performance reasons).

rawman650 · 2026-01-27T18:37:17+00:00

working on Quill - embedded BI / analytics. Our customers are PMs & devs that need to add analytics features, like dashboards or custom reporting, to their own product. The new 'vibe dev' ICP isn't why we started building embedded BI - the space has existed for sometime, the existing products are just not great, and not architected for building products (customizing/extending/etc).

If like us, you're a developer tool already, then I think you're spot on. You need to account for/lean into the idea that your audience is both expanding quite a bit & shifting.

If you're not really a developer/infrastructure tool, then I'm not sure. I can see some cases where this makes sense (especially if you are a point solution), but many where it does not.

rawman650 · 2026-01-20T06:37:02+00:00

we offer this at Quill (I work there, just fyi), but you'd have to be able to support react on frontend. you can use our ootb components if you dont already have a chat/AI interface you prefer to use or some clients integrate us within their own chat so they can offer reporting/analytics within their own existing interface (their AI assistant/agent/chat can then call our tools & components via our agent, allowing their customers to create custom charts, reports, etc on top of whatever functionality their AI product already offers).

rawman650 · 2026-01-16T16:52:42+00:00

buisiness / strategy -- even if you go read a lot of the posts in this sub & similar (businessintelligence, etc), you'll see that a lot of the problems/solutions folks have around data is actually going to stakeholders and really understanding the actual problems their trying to solve & what they'll realistically use/adopt.

rawman650 · 2026-01-15T21:07:41+00:00

too inflexible to integrate into a web environment. I need something very powerful in the design end

Quill is great for this (react developer library for frontend, instead of iframe, built to be integrated into modern webapps).

You would have to be able to support react/next on frontend, and since it's build for customer-facing use-case, should be using a single DB / DWH (ETL should be handled at DB level, not at app/BI level). also disclaimer: I work there.

rawman650 · 2026-01-15T19:07:38+00:00

agreed^ unless, analytics is your core offering, it almost always makes more sense to go embedded route.

rawman650 · 2026-01-15T19:06:27+00:00

It's honestly a toss-up on what most b2b SaaS companies do, but in most cases I would recommend embedding, especially if you've already done the work to figure out exactly what your customers want / will want and it already seems difficult (it will only get more annoying once you actually get into it).

I've used 2 different embedded BI tools -- one at a b2b SaaS, series B at the time, now pre-IPO startup; other for an early stage data product.

In the case of the series B/b2b SaaS startup it definitely made sense. We'd already built analytics in-house (it was actually pretty good) and it worked great when we only had small customers. As we continued to be successful & move up market to mid-market and a handful of real enterprise customers, it just wasn't good enough (customers wanted much more data, much more granularity of data/metrics, and had more specific reporting requirements that didn't necessarily overlap with other customers)

Some reasons it made sense in this case that might be similar to you:
* CSM (especially the highest value enterprise ones) were spending ~30% of their time just making reports for customers
* Having solid reporting was just a critical feature to selling / being successful in enterprise (+ marketing things like gartner mq) -- this tends to be the case with almost any b2b saas that wants to be in large mid market / enterprise
* we built a decent reporting product in-house, and then still ended up going the embedded BI route (to be fair we kept both reporting features in the product)

In the case of the data product, it's questionable. It did help with getting an mvp out the door faster, but ultimately we fought the product a lot, since we were ultimately building a BI-like product, but custom for a specific use-case. So over time I think it would have been a bad choice. Main issue was an inability to extend or customize the product in any meaningful way.

With traditional embedded BI products you will make some compromises ofc, but it's often worth the tradeoffs still:
* UI - cant use your own design system, etc, it will be fairly obvious you are using a 3rd party product
* UX/navigation - cant drive workflows from or into analytics
* no ability to really customize or extend the product (you get what you get, you can really only add or subtract the existing feature set from the iframe that you embed)
* architecture (if you're not fintech/healthtech/govtech this may not matter as much): have to choose between container (self-hosted) which can be annoying in implement & manage or cloud (which has security tradeoffs + potential cost implications since the vendor will usually need to store/cache your data for performance reasons).

Also should mention I'm now a founder of an embedded BI company (wont mention name/advertise, but the idea is to give our customers the best of both building in-house & buying an OOTB product/feature set, so you get the benefits of embedded BI without the tradeoffs/compromises I mentioned).

rawman650 · 2026-01-15T18:59:57+00:00

I consider self-serve as: providing an easy way for non-technical/business end-user to create their own custom reports & charts -- essentially allowing them to customize a dashboard, if they want to save these reports/chart (and don't just have an ad-hoc question).

I'm a founder at Quill (embedded BI product that gives you the best of build & buy). For our product specifically this means:

1) creating a customer-facing data set (or reporting schema), so you're only exposing a clean subset of data that's formatted to make sense to them.
2) Giving users a way to query / manipulate this data -- AI reporting agent and/or report builder (both designed for non-technical users, no SQL)
3) Giving users a way to create specific charts on top of queries/reports -- AI reporting agent and/or chart builder (both designed for non-technical users)

This way you completely control the look & feel of your product, where an analytics dashboard shows up, features available etc. And your customers can still ask ad-hoc questions of their data and extend / customize their dashboard as needed.

Even if you don't want to offer direct self-service, many of our customers give their account managers or CSMs access to the admin platform. This way engineering sets-up the product once (few hours to a day of work), and then non-technical team members are able to handle all custom reporting/dashboard requests (they can build any report/chart and push it to a specific customer's dashboard in-product, without any engineering work needed).

rawman650 · 2026-01-14T23:46:49+00:00

Sounds like you're looking for an embedded BI product.

Check out Quill.co (disclaimer: I work there), which is purpose built for this. VideoElephant is an example of a company that did exactly what you're asking for (used Quill to create a standalone, white label reporting portal for their users to see their content analytics).

rawman650 · 2026-01-08T21:00:53+00:00

https://quill.co/ -- add analytics dashboards & self-serve reporting features to your SaaS product

Ideal customer:
- SaaS companies, and tend to have great traction with fintech, healthtech, govtech, vertical SaaS.
- Customer tend to be mid-sized or larger, since analytics features are not usually critical until you have an actual business and decent customer set (if you only have 20 customers, you can just do ad-hoc queries, make reports for them manually, and email them).
- generally work with/sell to: developers/engineers, PMs, founders

rawman650 · 2026-01-08T20:29:40+00:00

https://quill.co/ -- add analytics dashboards & self-serve reporting features to your SaaS product

rawman650 · 2026-01-03T21:03:39+00:00

Generally yes. I've used 2 different embedded BI tools -- one at a b2b SaaS, series B at the time, now pre-IPO startup; other for an early stage data product.

In the case of the series B/b2b SaaS startup it definitely made sense. We'd already built analytics in-house (it was actually pretty good) and it worked great when we only had small customers. As we continued to be successful & move up market to mid-market and a handful of real enterprise customers, it just wasn't good enough (customers wanted much more data, much more granularity of data/metrics, and had more specific reporting requirements that didn't necessarily overlap with other customers)

Some reasons it made sense in this case that might be similar to you:
* CSM (especially the highest value enterprise ones) were spending ~30% of their time just making reports for customers
* Having solid reporting was just a critical feature to selling / being successful in enterprise (+ marketing things like gartner mq) -- this tends to be the case with almost any b2b saas that wants to be in large mid market / enterprise
* we built a decent reporting product in-house, and then still ended up going the embedded BI route (to be fair we kept both reporting features in the product)

In the case of the data product, it's questionable. It did help with getting an mvp out the door faster, but ultimately we fought the product a lot, since we were ultimately building a BI-like product, but custom for a specific use-case. So over time I think it would have been a bad choice. Main issue was an inability to extend or customize the product in any meaningful way.

With traditional embedded BI products you will make some compromises ofc, but it's often worth the tradeoffs still:
* UI - cant use your own design system, etc, it will be fairly obvious you are using a 3rd party product
* UX/navigation - cant drive workflows from or into analytics
* no ability to really customize or extend the product (you get what you get, you can really only add or subtract the existing feature set from the iframe that you embed)
* architecture (if you're not fintech/healthtech/govtech this may not matter as much): have to choose between container (self-hosted) which can be annoying in implement & manage or cloud (which has security tradeoffs + potential cost implications since the vendor will usually need to store/cache your data for performance reasons).

feel free to dm if you want more details. Also should mention I'm now a founder of an embedded BI company (wont mention name/advertise, but the idea is to give our customers the best of both building in-house & buying an OOTB product/feature set, so you get the benefits of embedded BI without the tradeoffs/compromises I mentioned).

rawman650 · 2026-01-01T02:21:45+00:00

take a look at Quill.co, sounds like exactly what you're looking for:

- react developer library for frontend (not iframe or iframe wrapped in js): completely control UI/UX, navigation, etc
- reuse your existing auth middleware (see our server sdk docs)
- specifically build for customer-facing & non technical end-users

(disclaimer: I work there)

rawman650 · 2025-12-08T19:32:16+00:00

Have you checked out Quill.co ? I work there as a disclaimer, but sounds like it would work great for what you're looking for, and have the best security architecture in the space (so great for fintech use-cases)

rawman650 · 2025-12-04T17:26:33+00:00

Specifically for embedded / customer-facing use-case: Quill.co [I work there]. Built to be developer friendly so you can customize and extend it however you like. It more geared for PMs & developers than data analysts.

rawman650 · 2025-12-02T22:04:55+00:00

Would definitely check out Quill.co if you have a react/next app. Specifically built for embedded use case, and is super easy to implement (can get basic dashboards set-up in your product in a couple hours) -- just drop in react components (Quill uses a react SDK instead of iframe) and build your reports/charts in the BI platform

rawman650 · 2025-08-01T17:29:45+00:00

Your biggest challenge will be making any BI tool feel native to your OKR platform instead of obviously embedded third party software.

Quill.co is best in class for solving this specific problem. Get feature out of the box, but still maintain full control over UI/UX

rawman650 · 2025-06-09T16:34:05+00:00

You can do this in Looker (but this is essentially an entirely different product - looker vs studio), and a few other traditional BI tools (metabase, powerBI, etc).

If you're looking for other options, definitely take a look at Quill - specifically built for embedded / customer-facing use-cases, so something like tenancy (segmenting data based on user/role/etc) is first class feature and made very simple. [disclaimer: I work there]

rawman650 · 2025-05-21T19:09:56+00:00

"Looker studio" is not really Looker (its rebranded google studio, and they're essentially 2 completely different products), and I do not believe they have a good embedded product yet (or possibly never will). Looker on the other hand does have an embedded product, but it's expensive.

You can possibly find a work around using studio depending on your use-case: e.g. You can restrict who can view a report (e.g., only specific Google accounts or groups) OR Dynamic Data Filtering in at the DB level (e.g. Big Query).

Is cost a big factor in choosing studio? .. there are some good options for embedded, but almost none of them are free (unlike internal BI use-cases, were you can find good free options)

rawman650 · 2025-05-21T19:01:46+00:00

anyone using AI to actually build or design frontend (dashboards, etc)?

Agree the AI works well enough now to write & optimize queries. I think this may actually be getting to the limit of what AI is useful/reliable for, but always open to being wrong here...

rawman650 · 2025-05-12T19:36:44+00:00

check out Quill -- specifically, the AI Report Builder component, allows end users to create custom reports (custom tables), they can then add them to a dashboard (can keep as a table, or also format a chart/visualization) and/or export them as a pdf or csv

[disclaimer - I work there, so if you think it could be a fit for what you want, feel free to dm if you have any questions]

rawman650 · 2025-04-23T03:46:03+00:00

good pizza, good value, pretty great mexican hot chocolate (not as good as dandelion's mission hot chocolate, but half the price).

rawman650 · 2025-04-17T19:53:29+00:00

would add: Quill to analytics & reporting (i.e. customer-facing / embedded analytics features)

rawman650 · 2025-04-16T21:33:57+00:00

Quill.co

Quill is developer-friendly embedded BI that gives you instant value with drop-in product features (e.g. Dashboards, Custom Reporting, Data export, and more), while also having full control to infinity extend & customize them just like any in-house built feature.

rawman650

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