Why SaaS Needs Embedded BI for Customer-Facing Analytics

Data is the lifeblood of the SaaS concept. SaaS companies use data to perfect their products through iterative design-build-test-learn cycles. Simultaneously, for SaaS users, data is needed for the smooth running of daily operations and insights. These people want their data delivered right into the platforms they use without disrupting their workflows. As a result, data analytics has become table stakes for every SaaS product.

SaaS companies now feel the need to integrate customer-facing analytics into their product experience. That is easier said than done, though. Building this capability in-house requires significant investment in time, engineering, and money. Using the traditional embedded BI tools is an option. However, these tools present challenges in terms of implementation and scalability.

Enter Embedded Peaka: A modern, full-stack solution that helps SaaS teams deliver powerful in-product analytics, without the data infrastructure burden.

What are embedded BI tools?

Embedded Business Intelligence (BI) tools refer to software that allows users to access analytics and reporting capabilities directly through an application’s user interface. This enables users to view, analyze, and act upon data without leaving the platform, providing them with a better user experience.

Embedded BI tools become part of your application’s core UX, unlike standalone BI tools that live outside the product and expect you to adapt to their own mechanics.

Embedded BI tools offer such benefits as

• Increased user engagement and stickiness: Embedded BI tools deliver analytics through your product’s UI and eliminate one of the major reasons that cause users to leave your app. This makes your product a bigger part of the user’s daily workflow.

• Differentiated product value: The seamless analytics experience offered through your product’s UI adds a new capability, helping it stand out from the crowd.

• Faster decision-making for your users: Embedded BI tools reduce time-to-insight, letting users access reports and dashboards while using your app. This helps eliminate dragged-out processes and inertia that all too often plague business operations.

Why traditional embedded BI tools fall short for SaaS

Building customer-facing analytics with traditional embedded BI tools is a tall order due to several shortcomings that these tools come with:

• Technical complexity: For many tools, creating an embedded analytics experience requires cobbling together separate pipelines, query engines, and UIs.

• Performance bottlenecks: Unifying the data before sending it to the BI tool requires pushing large volumes of data to a warehouse. This adds significant latency and cost.

• Customization limitations: Introducing dashboards from standalone products into your own platform is bound to undermine the style and feel you strive to establish for your product.

• Poor multi-tenancy support: Due to the variety of analytics needs in a company, data teams struggle to isolate customer data, implement fine-grained access controls, and maintain security across tenants.

Embedded Peaka: A simpler way to deliver in-product analytics

Embedded Peaka was purpose-built for SaaS platforms to simplify their access to analytics. Rather than stitching together backend data systems, query engines, and frontend libraries, Peaka offers a fully integrated solution that covers the entire data delivery pipeline from connector to dashboard.

Here’s a brief look at some of the features that set Peaka apart from he competition:

Seamless data integration

• Connect to 300+ data sources, from CRMs and billing systems to support platforms and ad tools

• No need to build and maintain your own connectors

• Zero-ETL data integration with live querying or smart-cached data access

High-performance query engine

• Built on an enhanced Trino-based federated SQL engine

• Smart caching via Iceberg to handle rate limits and reduce latency

• Real-time data access through APIs or SQL

Embedded, customizable UI components

• Prebuilt, brandable UI elements such as connector dialogs, SQL editor, data browser

• Full white-labeling and theming support

• Light, dark, or custom themes that match your product’s UX

Multi-tenant and secure by design

• Native support for project and catalog separation

• Row-, column-, and role-based permissions for fine-grained access control

• Built-in OAuth flows, audit logging, and compliance readiness

Why SaaS companies choose Embedded Peaka

For SaaS teams, Embedded Peaka offers several strategic advantages: + Faster time-to-market: Ship analytics features in weeks, not months.

• Reduced engineering overhead: Let your engineering team focus on creating value instead of spending hours to maintain a fragmented BI stack.

• Scalable governance: Manage user permissions, tenant isolation, and audit logs with the same efficiency regardless of the level of demand for analytics.

• Differentiated UX: Give your users a branded, embedded analytics experience that feels native to your product without building UI components from scratch.

Real-world use cases

Embedded Peaka has been used in different scenarios by companies from a variety of industries:

Martech

Embedded Peaka enables a marketing SaaS to pull campaign and ad data from HubSpot, Meta Ads, and Google Ads and visualize performance metrics inside the product.

Fintech

A B2B payments platform uses Embedded Peaka to retrieve data from Stripe and QuickBooks, turn it into financial dashboards, and embed them in the product.

E-commerce SaaS

Embedded Peaka provides an order management tool with real-time dashboards sourced from Shopify and Amazon. It lets merchants track order fulfillment, returns, and inventory.

While giving SaaS platforms the data access, transformation, and UI components they need, Embedded Peaka saves SaaS teams from the burden of building infrastructure from scratch to achieve this.

Final thoughts

Customer-facing analytics has become a key product differentiator for SaaS platforms. But achieving this capability is a challenge, as traditional embedded BI tools often fall short when it comes to speed, flexibility, and scalability.

Embedded Peaka changes that. This full-stack embedded BI solution is designed specifically for SaaS products that need to deliver governed, analytics-ready data and visualizations natively, without the data engineering burden.

Whether you’re embedding your first dashboard or scaling analytics across thousands of customers, Embedded Peaka gives your team the edge.

Schedule a demo and see how easy it is to embed BI into your SaaS product.