Top 7 Embedded Analytics Platforms

Choosing the right embedded analytics platform for your business needs is paramount. With its robust capabilities to expand your business, add value to your customers, and ultimately grow your profits, embedded analytics solutions are becoming essential for businesses that want to be able to survive in the market. 

We know that in today’s highly competitive business environment and flooded markets, choosing an embedded analytics vendor for your business needs could be quite overwhelming, and to help you make the best choice, we’ve compiled this list of the top 7 embedded analytics platforms. 

What Are Embedded Analytics Platforms?

An embedded analytics platform is when the solution is built to integrate seamlessly into existing business applications such as CRM, ERP, etc. Embedded analytics platforms are a set of business intelligence (BI) capabilities and data visualization tools designed to deliver real-time reporting and advanced analytics, including machine learning and AI (artificial intelligence), to users, providing them with insights in the context of their workflow.  

The primary purpose of the embedded analytics platforms is to provide data and insights in a simple and easy-to-understand way so that all users, including those with no analytic knowledge or skills, can use it to guide their decision-making.  

Embedded Analytics Benefits

Adding embedded analytics to your software comes with tremendous benefits. It helps end-users  
explore data and uncover valuable insights without the assistance of data analytics experts or ITs. Embedded analytics platforms also remove the need to switch between multiple apps to find their answers. Instead, users can look at key business data in context, increasing their productivity and efficiency. In addition, in-context analytics enables users to make better and smarter decisions that are backed up by data. This is one of the biggest embedded analytics benefits, as data is more legitimate and solid than a gut feeling. When users can access up-to-date data, they can act at the moment of impact and never miss an opportunity.  

Moreover, embedded analytics can help you grow your profits and even become an additional revenue stream.  

Top 7 Embedded Analytics Platforms

1. Reveal

Overview: Reveal was built with embedding in mind first, on today’s most modern architecture removing the complexity of embedding analytics into your application. It brings the power of data to the end user’s hands and lets you leverage actionable insights in your natural workflow – anytime, anywhere, and from any device.  

Key Features: Reveal offers robust dashboards, interactive data visualizations, self-service and white-label capabilities, and advanced and predictive analytics, including machine learning, forecasting, statistical functions, and more. The key features are completed by drill down, dashboard linking, dashboard blending, in-context editing, data blending, and native SDK.  

Why Choose Reveal: Reveal embedded analytics provides organizations with the most powerful, flexible, and predictable priced analytics tool on the market. It offers one single, simple, and affordable price point that enables you to reach unlimited users per application. More so, Reveal’s flexible architecture and rich APIs give you full control of the feature in your app, making it a seamless part of the user experience.

See Reveal in Action

2. Looker

Overview: Acquired by Google in 2019, Looker is a browser-based, business intelligence platform that helps collect, analyze, and visualize raw data. Looker analytics works only with SQL based data sources, which means that it can integrate with any SQL database or data warehouse, such as Microsoft Azure SQL Data Warehouse, Amazon Athena, and Greenplum. If you have your data stored elsewhere, Looker will need to put some form of an SQL database to query against. 

Features: Looker’s key features include data discovery, data exploration, fully customizable and exportable reports, charts and graphs, pre-built data models, and strong collaboration features. Looker has its own proprietary modeling language called LookML that you must learn before creating data visualizations.  

Also, Looker provides PDT (Persistent Derived Table) that can be used for some data preparation use cases, but it doesn’t support incremental and dependent materialization. 

Why Choose Looker: Choose Looker as your embedded analytics platform if you have your data stored in a SQL database or/and if you are looking for a solution that is 100% web-based.  

3. Toucan

Overview: Toucan Toco is a cloud-based platform that empowers businesses to explore their insights through visualizations and interactive dashboards. The platform specializes in data storytelling, data analysis, and managing projects. 

Features: Toucan offers Toucan AnyConnect, which lets you connect easily to hundreds of data connectors. It also offers Toucan YouPrep for faster data preparation eliminating the need for buying a separate ETL tool. Other key features include drill-down, data filtering, real-time and customizable reporting, instant messaging, and project management.  

Why Choose Toucan: Great features, and it’s easy to use. One of the platform’s greatest strengths is its flexibility to work with users’ data no matter where it’s stored. 

4. Sisense

Overview: Sisense is a self-service analytics and reporting tool that lets anyone create interactive dashboards & reports in minutes. 

Features: Sisense provides robust Bi features such as low-code and no-code tools, augmented analytics, data unification, data mash-up, drag-and-drop dashboard creation functionality, and in-chip technology for data processing.  

Why Choose Sisense: Faster time to insights thanks to the innovative in-chip technology to easily process volumes of data coming from many data sources and top-notch customer support. 

5. Logi Analytics

Overview: Formerly known as LogiXML, Logi Analytics is a web-based business intelligence solution that connects to a range of data sources, on-premise, and in-cloud, to source and optimize business-specific data. 

Features: The key features of Logi Analytics include interactive data analytics and visualizations, advanced reporting, self-service, and data discovery capabilities. Another feature that sticks out is the ability to customize the solution on many levels, including dashboards and charts. Users can also access style sheets and add their own CSS and JavaScript to reports.  

Why Choose Logi Analytics: It has robust API capabilities and customization options, great security, and it supports a variety of operating systems, including Linux and mobile. 

6. Tableau

Overview: Tableau is a BI system that offers a couple of services for data analytics, including Tableau Desktop and Tableau Server. Tableau Desktop is a self-service analytics solution that lets users look at data and answer questions. Tableau Server enables users to publish dashboards from Tableau Desktop on any web browser or mobile-based device. In 2019, Tableau got acquired by Salesforce.  

Features: Interactive data visualizations, drag-and-drop functionality, native data connectors, data column filtering, big data services, auto modeling, and self-service capabilities.  

Why Choose Tableau: It is one of the early players in the ABI space. It’s this maturity that makes it so appealing to many users and is one of the reasons why Tableau has such a large community.  

P.S. Tableau’s embedded capabilities as not as smooth as you would expect. Integrating Tableau into your application is both a financial and technical challenge.  

7. Power BI

Overview: Microsoft Power BI is a cloud-based BI and analytics service that works through two products: Power BI Desktop and Power BI Mobile. The Power BI Embedded solution allows businesses to embed Power BI dashboards and reports within their applications.  

Features: Power BI’s primary features are datasets, dashboards, and reports. The solution offers additional features: online analytical processing, a navigation pane, flexible tiles, a Q&A question box, and Office 365 app launcher.  

Why Choose Power BI: Familiar and easy-to-use interface similar to Excel with the ability to combine power analytics with a user-friendly UI and great data visualization capabilities.  

Final Thoughts…

As we compiled this list to guide you in the right direction, we encourage you to save some time to explore these top embedded analytics platforms deeper. If applicable, sign up for a demo, share it with your team for feedback, and find out which solution best fits your business needs.  

In the process of choosing, bear in mind that the features are not all that matter. Pay close attention to the supported data sources and visualizations, the application architecture, the vendor’s roadmap, and the support options available. And last, but not least, be careful with the vendor’s pricing model. Most embedded analytics vendors keep their pricing a secret and charge you unpredictable costs like usage and users. We recommend looking for a 100% transparent pricing model (fixed pricing that won’t come with any surprises, hidden fees, usage, or user tiers) that won’t escalate as your app sales increase.