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Ask HN: Business intelligence tools for e-commerce SaaS data reports

by ta3411 on 10/23/22, 4:15 PM with 12 comments

Hi,

I am building a SaaS to help customers sell their products. Our data is stored in PostgresSQL with a pretty typical products/orders tables setup.

I want to build an internal dashboard for us to track GMV and external dashboards for customers to see their sale volumes with different date range and search filtering. All of this would be embedded in our user portal web dashboard built with ReactJS.

I am wondering which tools startups are using these days to help with this data indexing so we don't have to select all from our sql database. I have heard of metadabase.com and cube.dev but curious to see if anyone has any recommendations.

  • by pea on 10/23/22, 7:36 PM

    If you are comfortable writing Python, check out our open-source framework for creating data web apps: https://github.com/datapane/datapane.

    It makes it simple to programmatically create serverless web apps from data, plots, and layout components, and you can embed them directly in your own product.

    Here's an example of an e-commerce report: https://cloud.datapane.com/reports/dA9yQwA/e-commerce-report

  • by seektable on 10/23/22, 5:05 PM

    It depends on what kind of embedded reports you need. Most BI tools offer iFrame-based integration as simplest way to embed visuals into any kind of front-end.

    Our BI tool (https://www.seektable.com) is often used as embedded BI with a very good value-for-money (about $250/mo for on-premise installation with white labeling). It is possible to embed individual reports, dashboards (that can contain custom visuals, your devs will like the approach) and even 'app view' (where users can make ad-hoc queries in a self-service manner).

  • by Rodeoclash on 10/23/22, 9:02 PM

    I'd vouch for Metabase. You can create charts that can be embedded fairly easily and the enterprise version allows you to create accounts with restricted access to datasets so it can be used by your customers in a self-service style.

    I pair it with AirByte to fetch data from CSV files on S3 (generated hourly), a Salesforce instance and Google Analytics which is then assembled into a central data warehouse (also Postgres).

    Both Metabase and Airbyte run nicely on Elastic Beanstalk. Airbase in particular is very easy to self host, maintain and upgrade.

  • by tylerrobinson on 10/23/22, 6:34 PM

    If you’re on AWS, QuickSight may be a good option. I am using it exactly as you are planning, with an internal view for us and external views for each customer to see their own data. It embeds into our React app.

  • by cloudking on 10/23/22, 4:18 PM

    Google Data Studio is pretty good for this use case. https://datastudio.google.com/

  • by jimmyechan on 10/24/22, 5:08 AM

    Are you looking for open source tools specifically? If not, check out https://www.explo.co

  • by vyrotek on 10/23/22, 8:15 PM

    Our SaaS startup just integrated PowerBI Embedded to provide common and custom reports to our customers.

  • by mstralka on 10/23/22, 10:14 PM

    We use Metabase for our B2B SaaS app and it’s worked very well.