What Are The Best Grafana Alternatives For Embedding Analytics In Saas Products?

By Author: Vhelical
Total Articles: 182
Comment this article

In today's data-driven world, SaaS products are expected to offer real-time insights, interactive dashboards, and user-centric reports right within the application. Embedded analytics has become a standard requirement, enabling end-users to access data without leaving the product ecosystem. It enhances user experience, drives engagement, and adds significant value to the SaaS offering.
While Grafana is a popular open-source visualization tool, especially among developers and IT teams, its capabilities for embedding analytics into SaaS products are limited in several ways. This has led many product teams to look for a Grafana alternative that offers more robust features for SaaS use cases.

What Makes a Good Embedded Analytics Tool?
When evaluating an embedded analytics solution for your SaaS application, it's important to consider several key capabilities:
• White Labelling: The ability to customize the look and feel of dashboards and reports to match your brand identity.
• Multi-Tenancy: Supporting multiple customers (tenants) securely within a single application instance.
• Role-Based ...
... Access Control (RBAC): Fine-grained user permissions to manage who sees what.
• API Integration: REST and JavaScript APIs for dynamic embedding, user provisioning, and automation.
• Interactive dashboards and reports with customizable visualizations and export options like PDF and Excel.
• Scalability: The ability to handle large datasets and growing user bases efficiently.
The right alternative to Grafana must go beyond real-time monitoring and support broader reporting, embedding, and customization needs.

Why Grafana Might Not Be the Best Fit for SaaS Embedding
Grafana excels in real-time monitoring and is widely used for DevOps dashboards. However, for SaaS products that require rich, user-facing analytics, Grafana has some notable limitations:
• Limited Report Generation: Grafana lacks native support for pixel-perfect, downloadable reports (PDF, Excel) which are often required by SaaS customers.
• Customization Challenges: Branding and UI customization options are limited, which can hinder full white-label integration.
• User Experience for Business Users: Grafana is more suited for technical users. Non-technical business users may find it hard to navigate or create their own reports.
• Complex Multi-Tenancy Setup: Achieving true multi-tenancy with secure data isolation requires custom setups and isn't native.
For teams needing more than just dashboards, a robust Grafana report alternative is essential.

Top Grafana Alternatives for SaaS Embedded Analytics
Here are some of the most capable tools that serve as alternatives to Grafana, particularly for embedding analytics into SaaS applications:
1. Helical Insight: Helical Insight is an open-source alternative to Grafana, designed for embedded, white-labelled analytics with support for interactive dashboards, scheduled reports, multi-tenancy, and detailed access control. Ideal for SaaS products.
2. Metabase: A user-friendly open-source BI tool suitable for start-ups, offering basic embedding but lacking advanced embedding features and multi-tenant support.
3. Apache Superset: Backed by the Apache Foundation, it is a reliable open-source tool for data exploration and visualization. It supports embedding but may require technical expertise for advanced setups.
4. Redash: A lightweight tool for SQL-based visualizations and dashboards. Suitable for dev-heavy teams, but limited in non-technical user features and report automation.
5. Power BI Embedded: Microsoft’s commercial offering for embedding analytics. Powerful but comes with licensing costs and less flexibility compared to open-source tools.
If you're looking for a Grafana dashboard alternative that offers a better balance between technical capabilities and user-friendliness, the above tools are worth considering—especially Helical Insight.

Deep Dive: Why Helical Insight Stands Out
Helical Insight stands out as a leading Grafana alternative for embedded analytics in SaaS applications. Here's why:
• Open-Source and Extensible: As an open-source platform, Helical Insight offers complete control over customization, data management, and deployment. Its plugin-based architecture allows you to add or extend functionalities as needed.
• Advanced Embedding Capabilities: With support for iFrame, JS APIs, and REST APIs, Helical Insight offers deep integration with your SaaS product. You can dynamically control dashboard behavior, inject user-specific data, and automate report generation.
• Multi-Tenancy and User Control: Helical Insight natively supports multi-tenancy, with robust user roles, data-level security, and tenant-wise data segregation—essential for SaaS applications.
• Report Designer for Non-Technical Users: Unlike Grafana, which is more developer-oriented, Helical Insight includes a visual report designer that empowers business users to build their own dashboards and reports without writing code.
• Empower business users to create ad-hoc reports, dashboards, infographics, and map-based visualizations.
• Supports advanced visual interactions like drill-down, inter-panel communication, and dashboard-level filtering.
• NLP-based analytics (coming soon) lets users ask questions in natural language for instant visual insights.
• Generate pixel-perfect, print-ready reports with precise layouts and pagination.
• Export reports to PDF, Excel, CSV, and schedule delivery via email with role-based report bursting.
• Fully customizable and white-labelled embedding using REST APIs, role-based access, and custom themes.
• Ensures security and scalability with SSO, mobile support, cloud readiness, and Docker/Kubernetes compatibility.
• Connects to any data source including RDBMS, NoSQL, APIs, and flat files with cross-database join support.
• Developer-friendly with a modern tech stack and full control via REST APIs and custom code.
• Offers flat, transparent pricing with a free Community Edition and optional enterprise support.
These capabilities make Helical Insight not only a Grafana report alternative but also a scalable and business-friendly open source alternative to Grafana.

Conclusion:
Choosing an embedded analytics tool is a strategic decision for any SaaS product. While Grafana is excellent for real-time monitoring and technical use cases, it falls short in areas critical for customer-facing analytics—such as user experience, multi-tenancy, and report generation.
If you’re searching for a comprehensive alternative to Grafana, especially for embedded use cases in SaaS, Helical Insight is a powerful contender. It combines the flexibility of open-source software with enterprise-grade features like embedding APIs, multi-tenancy, and white labelling.
Whether you're replacing Grafana or starting fresh, Helical Insight offers everything you need to deliver modern, interactive, and secure analytics to your SaaS users.