If you’re looking for a solution that enables you to embed analytics into your website or application and you’re not satisfied with the level of customisation freedom that off-the-shelf tools provide, you may benefit from a headless embedded analytics tool.

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What is headless embedded analytics?

Headless embedded analytics describes an approach to creating customer-facing analytics where you retain full control over the UX and UI, in code. This approach provides you with the benefits of an embedded analytics tool with the customisation freedom to be able to control your user experience down to the pixel.

Consider it the ‘best of both worlds’ when choosing whether to build or buy your customer facing analytics. Whilst you get the freedom to achieve the dream experience for your customers, as you would with a custom-build; you also get all the benefits of using an off-the-shelf tool.

The term ‘headless’ simply refers to a software design approach that decouples the frontend presentation layer from the backend logic and data storage. Learn more about headless architectures here.

"It provides a solid foundation for developing our BI dashboards, while still being flexible enough to customize charts to suit our business logic and UI design."

Brent Scholl, Full Stack Web Developer at Parcelytics.

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Benefits of headless embedded analytics

The main benefit of using a headless approach to your embedded analytics project is the freedom to  create your dream experience without limitations. But there's a lot more to be gained from choosing this approach.

• Retain full control over your UX and UI with full control over every charting component, in code, so the experience feels completely native to your application.

• Build with predefined components as you would get with any off-the-shelf tool, by using the charts provided, or by bringing in charts from your favorite charting library.

• Achieve a fully-native end-user experience where the charts follow your own design system, and load natively in your DOM, just like any other part of your application. 

• Embed easily with a native component that loads the experience without using an iframe, making it faster and more seamless for your users.

• Easily build and publish dashboards with a no-code interface that your non-technical team members can use.

• Provide unique interactive experiences like allowing your users to rearrange, configure and even create their own dashboards using your fully-bespoke charts and components. (While achievable, this is notoriously hard to build in-house!)

Embeddable is the first headless embedded analytics tool on the market, and also gives you the benefit of a complete suite of open-source charts, next-gen embedding with a secure web component, and a hosted cache that lets you hit sub-second loading times so your users don’t have to stare at a loading spinner (as they may well be used to with other tools). 

A headless embedded analytics approach is perfect for teams who really care about the user experience in their applications and either don’t want to, or don’t have the engineering resources to reinvent the wheel and build a whole BI experience from scratch. 

"Embeddable is the first tool that I have seen where it is so straight forward and simple to work with the data and build charts with them, where it feels like the heavy lifting is done once I finished modelling my data. The ability to then use some simple javascript and react to build my own combination of charts (rather then navigating the jungle of combo charts in existing BI tools) is simply amazing.”

Adeola Morren, Founder at iBenjamin.

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Limitations of headless embedded analytics

The headless approach to embedded analytics is built from the ground up to remove limitations so that you can achieve your dream analytics experience for your users. If you can imagine it, you can build it.

However, it’s not right for everyone. For example, if you really don’t care whether the charts and dashboards you create match your app/website’s design system, and you’d prefer to have a completely no-code tool (note: with any tool you will have to embed it using a little bit of code).

You may want a fully-bespoke end user experience that looks and feels like your app, but you don’t have the skillset or the resources in your team to spend any time on tweaking code. In this case, you’re better off with another tool. There are plenty out there!

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Should you choose headless embedded analytics?

Ultimately, you have to make a call on how important it is for you whether you’re ok with using components built and controlled by a third-party provider in your application. That’s the main difference between a traditional approach and a headless approach.

There are many benefits from choosing the headless approach, but as we mention above - it’s not right for every team. 

In the case of Embeddable, we take a consultative approach when we speak to teams who are interested in learning more about their options, and we’ll help you make the right decision for your needs and requirements.

If you’d like to chat to one of the team, you can submit your project from the website.