In the past year I decided to change the direction of this project a bit and aim to help agencies create quick dashboards for their clients. This seemed to be the main use-case Chartbrew was being used for.
Lots of new features have been developed to make this process easy, such as the introduction of templates, multiple new integrations and Firestore support which seemed to be underserved by the other dashboarding tools.
This project has been a massive undertaking, but it's rewarding to work on it since I enjoy working in this space. This year I also started making some money with the project, which also helps for sure!
I'll be around reading any feedback you may have about the project. Thanks for dropping by!
Raz
There is a basic transformation layer that does basic arithmetic and string concatenation. This is a continuous work in progress as I add more options the more feedback I get from customers. I actually received a request for extra transformations just yesterday. So gotta put those in the roadmap!
What is your differentiation vs solutions like Metabase or Grafana? I've used both into the past and have some annoyances with them.
The main difference is that Chartbrew is tailored more for companies working with clients in need of dashboards. What this means is that Chartbrew has granular permissions on dashboard-level to allow the clients to explore the data, a templating feature to quickly create dashboards for new clients, and easy embedding to get any chart in your own product.
Not yet documented, but Chartbrew also has an API for creating dashboards from templates through its API. This will allow product owners to spin up a new dashboard whenever they get new users/clients in their platform.
User signs up -> New dashboard is created -> User is given access to the new dashboard -> Charts are made available in other apps
Another obvious difference is in the feature set that is more vast in the other two solutions. This is both a blessing and a curse. Some feedback I received was that it was easy to create visualizations because of the simplicity. I'm always improving on current visualization aspects whenever a client needs something more complex, though. I'm aware I would never be able to come close to the more mature solutions, so I'm serving other use-cases instead. Hope this all makes sense :)
Chartbrew offers some different options for integrations such as custom API integrations (works with any REST API), MongoDB, and Firebase.
Also Chartbrew is not as complex as PowerBI which can be both a minus and a plus, depending on the use-case.
Or if you're wondering if you can offer the analytics platform by itself as a SaaS, I built a SaaS layer on top of it here: https://chartbrew.com
The pricing is a bit strange since you apparently pay by the hour you show users the dashboards and monthly, it starts from $700+/m which is much more than Chartbrew as a service (which is also free to self-host).
Another thing I'm not sure PowerBI has, are templates so that you can replicate dashboards for separate clients. In Chartbrew you can create your own custom templates or use the ones already created in the platform.
But before starting to use any of the services, make sure you data sources are supported by the platform.