Ask HN: Are any embedded BI tools good? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Are any embedded BI tools good?

6 pointsrogansage6 comments

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)

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There is a new approach of using static site generators to make BI pages feel instantly responsive.

- 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/

What do you think of a solution where it's headless (i.e bring your own charts / components) but with a no-code builder that gives you the benefits of an off-the-shelf tool to manage and update easily? (that's what we're building at embeddable.com)

It sounds like an interesting product but not a fit for us:

- 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)

These apps are pretty straightjacketed. When there’s a simply gui option to drag-and-drop it works like a charm. When you have to do anything in DAX life gets significantly worse. I’d rather be able to do data modeling in Python. But the point is pretty graphics so not a big deal. I wouldn’t look for a competitive edge in the analytics side.

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.

It's not ideal, but generally these tools aren't used by web developers. I did some stuff with Jasper reports and dashboards that took this approach and was then acquired by Tibco so may be merged with that toolset now. At the time I also evaluated Tableau, Qlik, PowerBI etc. Now had the best "look" but it just about worked for the business. This is a difficult market to get into though full of huge companies with dedicated solutions and then other large cloud providers. How would you differentiate yourself, gain sales and attract users?

I used to work for Sisense and I can say vouch for it being a good product with good support.

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