As a product leader, you know that the more value your customers get from your app, the more satisfaction and engagement it inspires. With embedded reporting, you can equip your users with the insights they need for data-driven decisions— directly in your product.
Traditional business intelligence and reporting solutions require users to interrupt their workflows and navigate complex tools. Embedded reporting, on the other hand, empowers users with increased operational efficiency, supports real-time decision-making, and transforms data into actionable insights—without the hassle of a third-party analytics tool.
Delivering that value to customers positions you at the head of the competitive landscape. And with the right embedded analytics partner, you can do it with less time and effort from your development team, get your reporting features to market sooner, and ensure long-term scalability for your solution.
What is embedded reporting?
Embedded reporting means integrating reporting and analytics directly into a software application. It puts business intelligence at users’ fingertips with dashboards and visualizations—right in the applications people are already using—making insights for data-driven decisions faster and more accessible.
For app creators, embedded reporting amplifies the value of their product for end-users. With traditional business intelligence tools, users have to navigate to a separate platform for data analysis. Analytics as a service (AnPaaS) solutions empower developers to efficiently build embedded reporting directly into their apps for a seamless customer experience.
Why embedded reporting boosts your competitive edge
As a product leader, you know your customers want actionable business intelligence and reporting. Your competitors are investing in meeting that need, so it’s crucial that your product delivers first-rate reporting tools.
There’s a powerful business case for advancing your app’s reporting functionality. Embedded reporting allows you to transform data into a competitive edge—adding tangible value for end-users while advancing your business objectives.
Whether you’re a no-code creator or an experienced developer, the Sisense product tour makes turning data into insights easier than ever.
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Benefits for your end-users
Streamlined analytics
Your end-users can tap into holistic, real-time reporting from a single location—your product—reducing the need for separate data storage, modeling, and transformation. Plus, you can unify data from multiple sources into your app’s reporting features, making your product a single source of truth for business intel.
Actionable business intelligence
Business intelligence and reporting isn’t truly useful unless it enables people to take action. Embedded analytics saves users the arduous tasks of configuring, curating, and formatting data from a separate tool. Instead, they can access real-time data reporting and visualizations that spur immediate understanding and decisions.
Enhanced user experience
Embedded analytics put visualizations right where users need them, when they need them. Instead of firing up a separate tool, your end-users can find real-time insights directly in your product, where they’re already working. Users don’t have to interrupt their workflows to pull reports or analyze data.
Faster, more accessible insights
When analytics are integrated into your app, users have instant access to real-time data reporting and insights. Analytics are always up-to-date and rapidly accessible to people across the organization. That empowers them to quickly make smarter decisions—driven by data.
Benefits for your business
Amplify innovation
The more fully-featured your app, the more it stands out in an increasingly competitive landscape. Integrating analytics directly into your product furthers your innovation and product growth. You can add (or improve) functionality that users are eagerly seeking, positioning you as a leader in your space.
Increase product adoption
Embedded analytics enhance your app’s value proposition at every stage of the funnel. Your app’s integrated reporting is a powerful differentiator as customers move through the sales cycle, onboarding process, and activation milestones. The result is higher product adoption rates—and lower early-lifecycle churn.
Increase engagement and retention
When you deliver the advantages of embedded analytics to your customers, you have a better chance of engaging and retaining them. Today’s customers expect more than just reporting functionality. They demand intuitive, personalized experiences. With integrated analytics, you can meet—and exceed—those expectations to drive long-term engagement.
Drive revenue
Embedded reporting features open up new business opportunities. From premium reporting features to customized solutions for enterprise clients, you can create new revenue streams with advanced integrated analytics solutions.
The benefits of an embedded reporting partner
Both you and your users stand to benefit from having embedded reporting in your app. When it comes to implementing that functionality, you’ll face the question of whether to build or buy—and you may end up doing a mix.
Whether you plan to enhance existing integrated analytics features or are building new reporting functionality, you’ll need a strategy for implementing embedded analytics without overburdening your development teams, pulling resources from other high-priority features, or slowing development velocity.
Building a solution entirely in-house can put a heavy burden on your engineering resources and come with a high opportunity cost. You run the risk of delaying time to market if your teams are tied up with product maintenance demands or juggling multiple priorities on your roadmap.
Leveraging an AnPaaS solution—either out of the box or as a complement to what you build internally—equips you to deploy embedded analytics quickly, efficiently, and cost-effectively.
Operational efficiency
Developers and data analysts are some of the most precious resources in an organization—and often some of the most overtaxed. Integrating an embedded reporting platform reduces the load on your teams. A combination of no-code, low-code, and code-forward approaches makes it faster and easier to build embedded analytics based on the smartest use of your internal resources.
Cost savings
Digital transformation has produced an explosion of data—and tech stacks have ballooned to handle it all. With an AnPaaS partner, you’ll streamline the number of data management tools you’re using (and paying for!). And it frees you up to direct FTE budget toward product development that can only be done by in-house teams.
Accelerated time to value
The sooner you get embedded analytics into production, the more quickly you’ll realize the ROI—and advance your competitive advantage. A third-party solution speeds time to market for embedded reporting features. Plus, it reduces the time teams require to upskill in emerging technologies and data science capabilities.
Scalability
Like any other product feature, embedded reporting calls for ongoing maintenance, iteration, and innovation. Working with the right AnPaaS partner takes that load off your teams’ shoulders. A best-in-class third-party platform scales with you as you grow and expands features in response to evolving market demands.
Enhanced security
Security is paramount when you’re expanding access to data within your app. A trusted embedded reporting partner provides advanced security architecture to ensure data protection. Handling compliance with strict regulations like GDPR and HIPAA requires extensive expertise and time—an embedded reporting platform can guarantee security and compliance across all environments.
Dedicated expertise
AnPaaS vendors specialize in analytics—and leveraging that expertise enables you to innovate rapidly. Developers get purpose-built tools to speed design and deployment of embedded reporting features. And you can rely on your partner’s niche know-how to deliver outstanding user experiences.
How to choose an embedded reporting platform
More and more, AnPaaS solutions offer out-of-the-box embedded reporting features that make it faster and easier for you to integrate analytics in your app (or enhance your existing reporting features). But not all solutions are created equal. While your business will have unique needs, there are a handful of features that any organization should look for in an embedded reporting platform.
Flexible, intuitive implementation
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One of the key benefits of an embedded analytics program is saving time—both the time it takes to get your embedded reporting features to market and the hours needed from your developers. An effective AnPaaS solution should provide flexible composability tools for integrating analytics without a heavy lift for your teams.
The Sisense Compose SDK is a complete developer toolkit for building out embedded reporting functionality directly from your application code. And with an intuitive, drag-and-drop interface, you also have the freedom to build with no- and low-code approaches.
Robust connections
The goal of embedded reporting is to serve up unified, actionable insights that power data-driven decisions. To deliver on the promise, your embedded analytics platform must bring together data from the full breadth of sources that you and your customers use—and do it in real time. Robust data source integration is a critical component of an embedded analytics platform.
Data connectivity in the Sisense platform is rooted in a flexible data engine and extensive library of connections. Over 400 connectors and live connections to cloud data warehouses draw in real-time metrics from every data source you need. And with ElastiCube, you can leverage smart caching to amplify the speed and flexibility of queries, even on massive data sets.
Extensive customization
A seamless customer experience drives engagement—and your embedded reporting is a core component of that. Look for a third-party tool with ample customization options so the analytics in your app look and feel exactly like your brand.
With the Sisense platform, you build your way—with effortless customization. Unlike solutions that force you to use predefined dashboards or widgets, Sisense gives you complete control over the look, feel, and functionality of your embedded reporting. Create customizable dashboards and context-aware analytics that live seamlessly within your app.
Interactive visualizations
Interactive data visualizations make business intelligence accessible to everyone. With self-service analytics, your users can drill down into data and extract various views of the same data set, selecting the specific data points they want to visualize on demand.
Sisense democratizes data-driven decision-making. The platform allows you to put end-users in the driver’s seat with self-service reports and interactive visualizations. They can easily generate hyper-relevant visualizations with just a few clicks—and go further with accompanying AI-powered insights.
Multi-platform accessibility
Meet your customers wherever they are. From your desktop app to your mobile app to your browser-based interface, ensure embedded reporting is portable across every channel. Choose an integrated analytics platform that supports all the environments in which users access your product.
The Sisense platform is designed to embed functionality across any environment. Multiple embedding options allow you to integrate analytics wherever and however users access your application.
AI-empowered capabilities
With the accelerating advancements in AI, customers are now demanding more from reporting tools. With generative AI capabilities, your embedded reporting breaks down barriers and increases the ease with which users can explore, understand, and apply data-driven insights.
Powerful generative AI features are woven throughout the Sisense platform to make analytics more intuitive and accessible. Natural language processing enables users to query data effortlessly and receive easy-to-understand narratives that place visualizations in context.
Security and compliance
Any time you bring data into your app, you run the risk of security lapses. Ensure your embedded reporting vendor uses the most stringent security measures, supports granular user access control, and is compliant with required standards for your industry.
Sisense leverages a host of security protocols to protect your data and enforce compliance standards. Advanced security architecture, identity and access management, and data visibility management ensure data security in your embedded reporting solution.
Platform and pricing scalability
When you bring embedded reporting into your app, you need a solution that will be viable years down the line. To ensure scalability, your AnPaaS partner’s solution must be built to support that growth—handling increasing data volume, increasing functionality as technology evolves, and structuring pricing to realize ongoing ROI.
Sisense Cloud combines agility with consistency, so you can add data, users, and projects without limits. And if you’re storing data on-prem, Sisense gives you the flexibility to leverage that source—as well as combine it with cloud solutions now or in the future. As your business scales up, the platform evolves with you. Customized, no-surprise pricing is tailored to meet your current budget and support your growth trajectory.
Start your embedded reporting journey
Ready to bring the power of embedded reporting to your users? Start mapping your next steps with our guide to embedding analytics for product managers. You’ll get practical tips, expert insights, and a step-by-step roadmap. By partnering with Sisense, you can get embedded reporting to market faster and use your resources more efficiently. Schedule a personalized demo to see how the platform can accelerate innovation for your app.