Early on, we used Metabase for speed. It’s great for internal dashboards and quick customer access, but starts to feel clunky once you care about UX, permissions, and embedding deeply.
For customer-facing analytics, we eventually leaned toward building thin custom views on top of a metrics API / warehouse. More work upfront, but you control performance, access, and product experience.
The tradeoff is obvious, tools get you to v1 fast, custom gets you to v2+. If analytics is core to your product, I’d build. If it’s a feature, I’d buy and move on.
Can you specify what you mean by "customer facing analytics", and what use case you have in mind? Metabase is a dashboard tool that's mainly used by internal data teams. But I guess you're interested in the "embedded analytics" part, i.e. you feature specific usage analytics of your app to your customers?
Charts, counters, tables, or dashboards that surface analytics for stakeholders or clients, rather than only the company’s internal team. Yes the embedded analytics part is what I was thinking when I cited metabase as an example
We’ve gone back and forth on this a few times.
Early on, we used Metabase for speed. It’s great for internal dashboards and quick customer access, but starts to feel clunky once you care about UX, permissions, and embedding deeply.
For customer-facing analytics, we eventually leaned toward building thin custom views on top of a metrics API / warehouse. More work upfront, but you control performance, access, and product experience.
The tradeoff is obvious, tools get you to v1 fast, custom gets you to v2+. If analytics is core to your product, I’d build. If it’s a feature, I’d buy and move on.
Can you specify what you mean by "customer facing analytics", and what use case you have in mind? Metabase is a dashboard tool that's mainly used by internal data teams. But I guess you're interested in the "embedded analytics" part, i.e. you feature specific usage analytics of your app to your customers?
Charts, counters, tables, or dashboards that surface analytics for stakeholders or clients, rather than only the company’s internal team. Yes the embedded analytics part is what I was thinking when I cited metabase as an example
Posthog