Inside Custom Canvas: How Embeddable Does End-User Self-Serve Right

If you’ve read our guide to the top self-serve embedded analytics tools, you already know why self-serve matters. It helps teams move faster, empowers users to explore data on their own - a huge win - and frees customer success from building one-off reports.

This post goes a layer deeper. Here’s how Embeddable delivers true end-user self-serve, what makes our approach different, and how product and data teams are using it in practice.

A quick reminder of what Embeddable is (and isn’t)

Embeddable is not a retrofitted BI tool. It’s a purpose-built customer-facing analytics platform - designed for SaaS and tech companies that want analytics to feel like a native part of their product, not a separate app, but know that building it themselves is a deceptively big, ongoing project.

Everything in Embeddable revolves around two foundations, brought together inside a powerful no-code dashboard builder:

1. Components - we give you a a full suite of beautiful, out-of-the-box chart and dashboard components, but we give them to you as code (React). This means you can theme them, extend their logic, or swap in your own components. It’s a headless architecture that integrates directly with your design system and product framework.

2. Data - instead of defining individual queries to power specific visualisations, you define reusable data models centrally that capture your metrics and access rules in one place. That makes maintenance and scalability far easier and analytics far more trustworthy.

Together, these layers let you build dashboards that look like you coded them yourself - only faster, with less complexity, and complete flexibility to iterate later without going through regular engineering cycles.

Introducing Custom Canvas

The next layer is end-user self-serve, powered by Embeddable’s Custom Canvas feature.

Custom Canvas lets your users build and extend dashboards directly inside your product, using exactly the same components and data models you’ve already created within Embeddable.

It gives you the freedom to create any experience you like:

• let users extend existing static dashboards.
• add a “create new dashboard” button.
• enable users to share dashboards, with some able to edit and some able to view.

Whatever unique value you want to offer based on your business and the technical ability of your users, you can do it.

And best of all, there’s no separate BI interface, no iframe, and no new authentication flow - it all just works with your existing Embeddable set up:

• It uses your visual language and brand, so feels native.
• It loads instantly.
• It inherits your existing security rules.

You can find both the overview and technical setup in our docs.

How self-serve works in practice

To set up Custom Canvas within Embeddable, all you need to do is turn it on it for a specific dashboard. When you do this, you’re essentially enabling a guided playground for your users.

You choose:

• The datasets available. These come directly from your existing data models, which means all metric definitions and row-level security automatically apply.
• The charts / components available. Decide which visualizations users can pick from - bar charts, KPIs, tables, maps, or even custom visualizations you’ve pushed to Embeddable using our SDK.
• The visible inputs for each chart. Control what users can change by exposing certain inputs, or pre-filling and hiding others. For example, you might always display charts legends, while giving users the flexibility to decide themselves how data should be formatted or rounded.

From there, users can build and extend dashboards, combining the data and charts in any ways they want to based on the insights, and ways of visualizing these, that are most valuable to them.

All you need to do is decide how far to open it up - some companies expose it only to certain customers on paid plans, while others roll it out to their entire customer-base.

For full details, see the Custom Canvas deployment guide.

Why users love it

For end-users, Custom Canvas feels like genuine empowerment. They can build what they need, when they need it, without leaving your product:

• Immediate insight. They can explore data and create views that provide the most value to them. Gone are the days for a member on a member of your team to craft a custom report or perform a data export!
• Freedom within guardrails - even completely non-technical customers can explore and customize within confidence, since all definitions come from your central models and they don’t need to worry about the complexities of SQL.
• Seamless, scalable experience - dashboards feel 100% native, and grow with users’ needs - from a quick chart to a full reporting hub.

Over time, these users tend to engage more deeply. They understand their data better, share dashboards across teams, and rely more on your platform as a source of truth - which increases stickiness and reduces churn: a huge win for any company.

Why it matters for your team

Anyone who’s worked in product or data knows that delivering data to a user isn’t where the journey ends, but where it begins. That’s what’s so complex about building customer-facing data experiences - the requests and requirements never end!

And that’s exactly why Custom Canvas is also so valuable to your team: by empowering your end-users to help themselves to exactly what they need, you’re saving your own teams the time and effort of continuously building custom reports.

• Less manual work. Instead of responding to endless “can you add this metric?” requests, your team focuses on improving models and performance, and making this available to end-users to access themselves.
• No extra stack. It runs on the same Embeddable deployment, using your existing tokens and environment isolation.

Most teams start by enabling Custom Canvas for power users, then open it to broader audiences once they’ve observed how people use it. It’s an easy, controlled way to evolve from static dashboards to interactive, living analytics inside your product.

How it works behind the scenes

Under the hood, enabling Custom Canvas is simple.

If you’re embedding dashboards using Embeddable’s HTML web components, all you need to do is add one property - customCanvasState - to your server-side security token request. That’s what enables user dashboards to be created, saved, and loaded, all on Embeddable’s side.

From there, you can:

• grant read-only or edit access.
• load a specific parent dashboard (empty, so they’re starting from scratch, or pre-filled, so they’re extending an existing dashboard)
• and maintain your existing row-level security through the same security context object.

No extra database, no separate API layer. It all runs within Embeddable’s secure embedding framework.

For full details, see the Custom Canvas deployment guide.

The takeaway

End-user self-serve shouldn’t feel risky or detached from your product.

It should feel like a natural extension - an experience that empowers users while preserving consistency and control.

Embeddable’s Custom Canvas lets you offer that balance. Your customers get freedom and speed, regardless of their technical ability; your teams keep focus and governance.

It’s analytics that scales elegantly - inside your app, powered by your data models, built on your terms.

‍