Ask HN: Are any embedded BI tools good? I've spoken to a bunch of people who use BI tools to embed analytics into their apps with an iframe. Nobody seems to like what they get despite some big players (PowerBI from Microsoft, Looker from Google, Tableau from Salesforce, Metabase etc. etc.) -- (Full disclosure: our team working on a solution to this) |
- Evidence.dev (https://evidence.dev/) - Observable Framework (https://observablehq.com/framework/)
I have found that both the speed and the frontend control either of these tools gives you is pretty good (with Evidence looking better out-of-the-box just in my personal opinion).
The main problem I always had with the embedded versions of Tableau, Looker, etc. is that they felt super canned (it was obvious it was a poorly/"lightly" white labeled solution -- when you see an embedded Tableau dashboard, you _know_ it is Tableau, etc) and they were slow.
More on this here: https://magis.substack.com/p/an-observation-on-dashboard-spe...
PS -- I would add that the "headless" version of the above tools that I have seen is https://cube.dev/
- We actually don't want no-code. We want configuration based (or something else that can fit into version control). - We want very nice, very customizable charts, but don't want to bring our own (our team is Python/SQL and data based; no one writes Javascript)
For me the real issue is data engineering. I spend much more time changing data sources manually than I do making fancy analytics. I’m not sure if that sells software though! Execs want analytics that increase revenue or decrease costs. There may not be value in improving the weak points in this software even though it would make a better product for its users.