The user experience of an embedded analytics dashboard is critical for just about everyone in the data analytics process. Today’s users expect a smooth UI and UX, developers want the embedding process to be easy, and lastly, your business’s bottom line depends on both of those audiences being happy.
For a long while, embedding dashboards into software applications or websites meant using iframes. While they can work in a pinch, they force you to make many compromises that ultimately hurt the end-user.
Today, we’ll explain why iframes are not the right way to embed dashboards into your customer-facing application.
What are iframes?
In web development, iframes (short for inline frames) are HTML elements used to embed another HTML page within the current page. They act as a window to a separate website/document, which is loaded independently of the parent page.
It looks something like this:
<iframe src="https://example.com" width="600" height="400"></iframe>
Iframes are commonly used for:
- Integrating analytics dashboards or third-party widgets
- Embedding YouTube videos
- Displaying external websites or tools
- Loading ads or analytics widgets
They have a few main characteristics.
- The embedded content is sandboxed from the parent site, meaning you often can't easily manipulate it with JavaScript or CSS from the parent document.
- It operates in a separate browser context, like a mini browser inside a page.
- It has its own scrollbars, rendering rules, and sometimes its own security policies.
Over time, iframes’ popularity has decreased and in their place, developers have started using API-based integrations or SDKs for embedding.
The reason is simple: iframes are just not a good solution for embedding, especially analytics dashboards in your product.
Here are some of the main reasons why you should stay away from iframes as an embedding method.
It doesn’t look very good
An iframe loads its isolated document, so your global style sheets, CSS variables, icon fonts, and motion guidelines never reach the embedded dashboard (ref). Developers who try to “skin” the frame must inject custom CSS or rely on brittle JavaScript workarounds, which often break after a supplier updates their markup (ref).
Aside from the transparent default background, most styles cannot be inherited, forcing duplicate style maintenance in two places. The result is a visual mismatch, with your product and dashboards looking completely unrelated to each other.
In a design-system culture where tokens define typography, spacing, and color once, an iframe is a silo that blocks every cascading rule.
This mismatch becomes painfully obvious when doing even the basic tasks. For example, when you switch to dark mode or raise the global font size for accessibility.
Your end users expect brand-consistent dashboards that match the host app down to the smallest pixel.
Ultimately, an embedded document that refuses to share variables simply means extra work in every sprint just to look consistent - if it’s even possible to achieve this. It will look off-brand, and you’ll steal time from your devs who need to work on more important projects.
Limited native interaction with your front-end
Interactive SaaS products rely on seamless event flow between components.
With an iframe, the only sanctioned bridge is postMessage, which is asynchronous, string-based, and easy to misuse (ref). Anything more sophisticated demands a local SDK or direct component import, both of which are impossible when the dashboard lives in a separate browsing context.
Chrome’s cross-origin isolation guide shows that even simple features like SharedArrayBuffer require strict headers once a cross-origin frame is present, which complicates security headers and feature support. Engineers lose the ability to tap into native routing, React context, Redux stores, or Vuex state (ref).
As the product evolves toward micro-frontends, multiple consumers might need to listen for “filter changed” events or push telemetry. Every extra postMessage channel adds boilerplate, increases latency, and invites hard-to-debug race conditions. In short, you trade a tight component contract for a text-based message bus wrapped in fragile origin checks.
Responsiveness and layout headaches
A dashboard inside a frame sets its own viewport.
That viewport rarely matches the fluid breakpoints of the surrounding app, leading to double scrollbars, clipped charts, and awkward whitespace. Community posts catalog entire checklists for managing scroll resize loops in Chrome and Safari, including the infamous “iframe dancing” where the parent and child endlessly resize each other (ref).
Even when developers apply the classic “padding-top percentage” trick, many dashboards still show internal scrollbars on smaller laptops, as illustrated by the responsive-iframe question on.
Mobile browsers add an extra layer of pain by zooming into the frame and disabling momentum scrolling, so charts feel slow compared to the native parts of the UI (ref).
These layout quirks force teams to ship special containers around the frame or add user-agent sniffing scripts, which is work that disappears once the same dashboard is shipped as a first-class JavaScript widget.
Debugging and observability friction
Modern DevTools can step through TypeScript, profiling paint times, and tracing network waterfalls, but only within a single execution context. When your dashboard lives in a different domain, the console defaults to the top frame, and engineers must manually switch contexts in the execution selector before any variables appear (ref).
That context switch hides early errors that occur before the user toggles the frame. Source maps, lighthouse audits, and performance recordings are also split across processes, so traces lack the full waterfall of events. If the frame is cross-origin, security restrictions forbid inspecting its internal DOM at all (ref).
Observability platforms tell the same story: browser errors and performance spans collected by the host app cannot reach the framed dashboard without extra instrumentation. Teams end up juggling two monitoring pipelines just to see one screen, which slows incident response and increases mean-time-to-resolution.
Expanded security attack surface
Security teams have raised red flags about iframes for years. Cross-frame scripting, clickjacking, and credential phishing are common exploits, since the frame executes third-party code inside your trusted domain (ref).
WorkOS reiterates that hidden frames encourage session hijacking and make phishing forms look legitimate, creating a wide social-engineering window (ref). While modern browsers offer sandbox and CSP attributes, they require perfect header configuration and constant updates. Site isolation in Chrome even spawned an entire architecture change (out-of-process frames) to mitigate the risk, but that protection comes with extra memory overhead and still leaves postMessage channels vulnerable if not validated.
If you must stay in an iframe, you could try using a typed wrapper (e.g. postmate, comlink) to regain structure. However, this creates additional work and problems to solve.
Replacing an iframe with a direct component or SDK reduces the number of origins involved, shrinks the XSS surface, and avoids clickjacking mitigation banners that frustrate users.
Performance and resource overhead
One deep dive on iframe performance highlights redundant network handshakes, extra parsing of duplicated libraries inside the sub-document, and double style recalculation for every layout change. Even simple dashboards often re-download charting libraries that the host already includes, wasting bandwidth.
Developers notice the penalty in worst-case situations: a Stack Overflow report documented a form that loaded in two seconds directly but sank to forty-five seconds when displayed through a frame in an iOS web view.
Add the fact that Chromium has to juggle out-of-process frames to keep the main tab responsive, and you see how memory and battery drain scale with every embedded report.
By replacing frames with lightweight JavaScript components, you ship one bundle, share caching layers, avoid extra TLS handshakes, and eliminate redundant DOM trees.
Identity, cookies and browser policy challenges
Chrome, Firefox, and Safari are phasing out third-party cookies to curb tracking (ref). Chrome now follows a user-choice prompt model instead of a hard block.
Many BI platforms still use cookie-based sessions to keep a user logged in. Once blocked, your support team sees “please log in again” loops, often traced back to the framed dashboard (ref).
Workarounds such as OAuth flows in pop-ups complicate the user journey and require extra scopes. In contrast, a direct component running in the same origin can use your normal session cookie or bearer token, dodging browser deprecation timelines entirely and simplifying single sign-on audits.
Long-term maintainability and product velocity
Every dashboard shipped through an iframe ties your roadmap to a third-party release cadence and markup structure. Simple tasks—adding a data attribute for QA automation, refactoring a table component, changing the error boundary—demand coordination and version pinning.
Debug symbols, accessibility labels, and localization strings live outside your mono-repo. Engineers cannot tree-shake unused code or participate in your automated visual diff pipeline. Over months, the frame becomes a black box that resists refactoring tickets, making larger architectural changes costly (ref).
By contrast, an SDK or component library grants full source control, predictable semantic versioning, and the ability to run Storybook or Chromatic snapshots alongside the rest of the UI (ref). Faster iteration translates to quicker customer feedback loops and a cleaner codebase over the life of the product.
The best alternative for embedding dashboards in SaaS apps
Using iframes for embedding dashboards in 2025 is a bad choice for everyone involved. You might think you’ll be saving time and maybe even cutting some costs, but at the expense of a poor user experience, reduced performance, and security vulnerabilities.
Embeddable is a next-gen embedded analytics toolkit, designed from the ground up with the latest technologies to give power to product and development teams. It avoids iframes altogether, giving you the option to embed either with native React/Vue embeds or web components.
In doing so, Embeddable ensures your dashboards:
- Can seamlessly adopt your app’s design system: typography, spacing, and theming flow naturally, ensuring a unified visual experience. See how Embeddable’s customers’ dashboards fit seamlessly into the host application.
- Communicate directly with your application code: no more string-based messaging or cross-origin complexities. Events, state, and filters can be synced as if the dashboard were built in-house.
- Load fast and respond fluidly: without the overhead of separate browsing contexts, performance is snappier and more memory efficient than any iframe-based embedding.
- Debug with confidence: view source maps, trace performance, step through TypeScript, and profile with developer tools just like any other component in your app.
Under the hood, Embeddable provides a robust backend layer for security, caching, and data connectivity. But every chart and dashboard lives in your codebase, under your version control, all ready to be tested in Storybook and visually compared in CI, or styled to match accessibility requirements.
Learn more about Embeddable.
Frequently asked questions
Why do iframes break design consistency?
A frame cannot inherit the parent application’s cascading style sheets, design tokens, or motion guidelines because it loads a fully isolated document. Developers often learn this when they try to restyle fonts or colors and discover that each variable must be overridden inside the child page. Any update to the design system then requires duplicated work, and dark mode or accessibility changes appear mismatched between the shell and the dashboard.
What makes using iframes a security concern for dashboards?
An iframe operates in a separate browsing context, which opens doors for clickjacking, cross site scripting, and hidden form attacks. Google engineers tackled the problem by moving every remote frame into its own renderer process for extra isolation, but that step alone does not stop social engineering tricks that mask malicious input fields inside the frame. Removing the separate document eliminates that threat class and allows a single origin policy to protect both the app shell and the charts.
How does Embeddable eliminate iframe-related issues?
Embeddable mounts charts, tables, and ad hoc queries directly in the host document using native React/Vue embeds or web components, so analytics respect the app’s style variables and respond to the same router, store, and context that power the rest of the interface. Product comparisons highlight sub-second load times and two-way interaction without separate processes, because the SDK renders in the same JavaScript runtime and avoids the memory penalty seen with frame isolation. By dropping the frame boundary, Embeddable also inherits the host’s authentication flow, enables full observability in a single trace, and lets designers adjust colors or spacing once for the whole product.
