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SaaS teams choosing an embedded analytics approach face two very different philosophies. This guide compares Embeddable and Metabase across architecture, developer experience, customization, performance, security, pricing, and migration. It’s written for product and engineering leaders evaluating a dashboard solution for customer-facing use cases, with a clear, source-based view to help you decide faster.
TL;DR
- Metabase excels for internal BI and simple embeds - great starter option, with stronger embedding and governance on paid tiers.
- Embeddable is developer-first for customer-facing analytics: native UI integration, multi-level caching, and robust RLS for multi-tenant SaaS at scale.
Quick Overview – Metabase vs Embeddable at a Glance
What Is Metabase?
Overview & Core Philosophy
Metabase is an open-source BI platform focused on simplicity and self-service for internal analytics. It shines for internal teams that need fast visualization and lightweight governance with minimal setup.
Strengths of Metabase
- Internal self-service BI: Easy for analysts and stakeholders to explore data.
- Fast setup & visualizations: Low friction to connect a DB and publish dashboards.
- Deployment flexibility: Cloud or self-hosted options.
Limitations of Metabase for Embedded Use Cases
- Embedding via iframes for full-app experiences: “Interactive embedding” loads the Metabase app in an iframe; good functionality, but feels external in SaaS UIs.
- Advanced SDK features gated to paid plans: The Embedded Analytics SDK (React) is Pro/Enterprise only.
- Security features by tier: Row/column security (formerly “data sandboxing”) comes with paid plans.
- Seats-based pricing: scaling analytics to many customers comes with a cost-per-viewer meaning costs are unpredictable and can scale quickly.
What Is Embeddable?
Overview & Philosophy
Embeddable is a developer-first toolkit for building native-feeling analytics directly into your product, without iframes. Teams model data, ship reusable components, and compose dashboards that render as part of the app, not beside it.
Key Strengths of Embeddable
- Looks & behaves like your app: Embed via a web component/SDK; interact with variables/events for a seamless UX.
- No iframes: DOM-native rendering for deep integration and fine-grained control.
- Performance at scale: L1 in-memory cache + L2 pre-aggregations, plus a caching API.
- Secure by design: Server-side security tokens, row-level policies, tenant isolation patterns. SOC2 Type 2 certified.
- Developer control: Versioning and component workflows aligned with CI/CD and code ownership.
- Fast time-to-value: Product teams assemble dashboards and toggle on/off advanced features; engineering retains control of guardrails and performance.
Ideal Use Cases for Embeddable
- Customer-facing analytics in SaaS where UX, UI and loading speeds matter.
- Large multi-tenant user bases are supported with performance at scale.
- Replacing an embedded BI software to increase control and improve the developer experience and end-user experience
- Replacing a custom built dashboards/reporting to reduce engineering overheads but retain control and high performance
Feature Comparison Deep-Dive
1) Developer Experience (DX)
Metabase
- Quick to prototype; strong for internal dashboards.
- The legacy of an architecture built for internal data teams creates complexity and restrictions.
- Workarounds necessary to handle auth in multi-tenant applications.
- Advanced embedding and the React SDK require Pro/Enterprise; managing parity with app branding is impossible as UI control is restricted and iframes are mandatory.
Embeddable
- Quick no-code setup, with option to extend and modify in code
- Intuitive SDKs, version control and deployment to environments.
- Extensive and clear developer documentation
- Deep integration with your app, allowing app state to drive charts and vice versa.
"The impact on our development team has been immense, it has offloaded much of the work from Developers and allows Product Management to be far more experimental and flexible in developing our reporting feature." - Kaitlyn Lovatt, Lead Product manager at HONK.
What it implies: If your product team needs fine-grained control and design fidelity without maintaining a separate BI surface, Embeddable’s model fits typical SaaS engineering workflows better than Metabase’s approaches.
2) Performance & Scalability
Metabase
- Offers caching and performance optimizations; results vary with dataset size and tier; interactive embeds add UI flexibility but still render an app inside an iframe causing increased latency.
Embeddable
- Multi-level caching: L1 in-memory protection for hot queries and L2 pre-aggregations (materialized rollups) for scale; Caching API helps orchestrate refreshes by tenant/security context. Lightweight, performant embedding reduces latency.
“Performance with complex retail data has been excellent. We're processing millions of data points across multiple retailers and product categories without performance issues.” - Alejo B. Chief Data Officer on G2
What it implies: For many-tenant SaaS with concurrent users and heavy dashboards, pre-aggregations plus a programmatic cache strategy typically reduce load times and DB pressure.
3) Customization & Design Control
Metabase
- Theming options exist but are limited to basic controls like colours & fonts (tiers apply).
- Ultimately it looks and feels like Metabase has been embedded in your application.
Embeddable
- Native components in your DOM; complete CSS/JS control; pass variables and React/Vue state; use your charting libraries and custom components.
- Will look and feel like a custom-build, adopting your design system to the pixel.
“"We’ve been particularly impressed with how easily Embeddable adapts to our brand and styling requirements, making it a seamless part of our user experience." - Brian Williams, CTO at Mpathic AI.
What it implies: If you need pixel-perfect control and integrated UX (e.g., filters, tabs, permissions, and app events acting together), Embeddable provides zero-compromises, whereas Metabase has an opinionated UI.
4) Security & Governance
Metabase
- Row & column security (formerly “data sandboxing”).
- Embedding supports SSO/JWT flows; governance features expand on higher tiers.
Embeddable
- Row-level security via server-generated security tokens; access policies for safer, scalable isolation; designed for per-tenant contexts in customer-facing apps.
- Role-based access control (RBAC) is built-in.
- SOC2 Type 2 compliance, GDPR, encryption, SSL/TLS and enterprise security standards.
“Embeddable offers an easy to use way to embed your reports on your pages, being able to securely admin who gets to see what with an intuitive RLS system." Nickolas S. on G2.
What it implies: Both support RLS, but Embeddable’s tokenized, tenant-aware approach is specifically modeled for multi-tenant customer analytics and is inherently more flexible.
5) Pricing & ROI
Metabase
- You’ll need Pro/Enterprise for embedded scenarios which starts at $575/month plus $12 per end user per month. Available Cloud or self-hosted. Budget for paid tiers if you need SDK/SSO/white-label and governance.
Embeddable
- Embeddable offers plans with fixed, predictable pricing including unlimited users, viewers and dashboards.
- Pricing stays fixed, even as usage and users scale.
“We used Metabase at first, after comparing it to tools like Looker and Holistics.io. Embeddable offered the best experience at a lower pricing, and allowed us to offer embedded analytics quickly.” - Rodel van Rooijen, Founding Engineer at Solvimon.
What it implies: For internal BI or minimal embedding, Metabase’s entry cost is attractive. For customer-facing SaaS where product UX and scale matter, Embeddable’s development model can reduce ongoing engineering overhead, especially as requirements evolve.
When to Choose Metabase
Best for
- Internal analytics at startups or small teams needing quick dashboards.
- Simple embeds where UX parity is not critical and user bases are small and stable.
Where it falls short
- Won’t feel like part of the host application.
- Embedded as an iframe.
- Performance at scale is unreliable (slow loading times)
- Complex workarounds to handle auth in multi-tenant applications.
- Pricing scales quickly for large or fluctuating user bases.
When to Choose Embeddable
Best for
- SaaS products exposing customer-facing analytics requiring design fidelity and seamless UX.
- Developer-led teams that want code ownership, versioning, and CI/CD-friendly workflows.
Added value
- Reduced engineering effort versus custom builds; no iframe maintenance.
- Increase control and performance vs. Metabase.
- Programmatic caching and RLS patterns suited to many-tenant products.
Want to see how Embeddable performs in your app? Learn more.
Case Studies & Proof Points
- Pledge (supply-chain emissions analytics) moved to customer-facing analytics with Embeddable.
- Fashion Cloud reports new value and revenue opportunities from embedded analytics.
- Additional stories: HONK, Cakewalk, Resident Advisor, mpathic.ai etc.
FAQ
Is Metabase a good embedded BI solution?
Not really. It’s fine for simple embeds and internal use. For customer-facing SaaS, advanced embedding requires paid tiers and suffers from performance, UX and developer experience flaws.
How customizable is Metabase when embedded?
The React SDK on Pro/Enterprise increases flexibility to render individual charts separately but you’re still embedding Metabase’s UI with some limited styling options. A full dashboard is also embedded as an iframe.
How performant is Metabase?
It supports caching and can perform well with tuning, but performance at scale depends on data size, modeling, and plan features. It’s also slowed down by rendering the Metabase app via an iframe in your own app before queries can run.
How customizable is Embeddable?
Very high. Components render in your DOM with your design system; variables/events enable two-way interaction and custom behaviors. Charts are defined in code so are infinitely extensible. Your end users can also build their own custom experiences.
How performant is Embeddable?
Very performant, even at scale. Multi-layer caching (in-memory + pre-aggregations) and a caching API are built for multi-tenant scale.
Does Embeddable support multi-tenant security?
Yes. Server-issued tokens carry tenant/security context; you can enforce row-level access policies.
What are the deployment options?
Metabase: Cloud and self-hosted. Embeddable: Cloud and on-premise (self hosted) options are available.
References
- Metabase. Static embedding (signed embedding). Retrieved Nov 17, 2025, from https://www.metabase.com/docs/latest/embedding/static-embedding
- Metabase. Interactive embedding. Retrieved Nov 17, 2025, from https://www.metabase.com/docs/latest/embedding/interactive-embedding
- Metabase. Embedded analytics SDK (intro/quickstart). Retrieved Nov 17, 2025, from https://www.metabase.com/docs/latest/embedding/sdk/introduction and https://www.metabase.com/docs/latest/embedding/sdk/quickstart-with-sample-app
- Metabase. Pricing. Retrieved Nov 17, 2025, from https://www.metabase.com/pricing/
- Metabase. Row and column security (formerly data sandboxing). Retrieved Nov 17, 2025, from https://www.metabase.com/docs/latest/permissions/row-and-column-security and tutorial page.
- Embeddable Docs. Home; Building dashboards; Development intro. Retrieved Nov 17, 2025, from https://docs.embeddable.com/
- Embeddable Docs. Interacting with your Embeddable (variables/events). Retrieved Nov 17, 2025, from https://docs.embeddable.com/deployment/interactivity
- Embeddable Docs. Embedding dashboards; security tokens. Retrieved Nov 17, 2025, from https://docs.embeddable.com/deployment/embedding
- Embeddable Docs. Row-level security & access policies. Retrieved Nov 17, 2025, from https://docs.embeddable.com/data-modeling/row-level-security
- Embeddable Docs. Caching: L1 in-memory; L2 pre-aggregations; Caching API. Retrieved Nov 17, 2025, from https://docs.embeddable.com/data-modeling/caching/in-memory, /caching/pre-aggregations, /caching/caching-api
- Embeddable. Customer stories: Pledge; Fashion Cloud; HONK; Cakewalk; Resident Advisor; mpathic.ai. Retrieved Nov 17, 2025, from https://embeddable.com/customer-stories/* pages.
