We’ve gone back and forth on this a few times.
Early on, we used Metabase for speed. It’s great for internal dashboards and quick customer access, but starts to feel clunky once you care about UX, permissions, and embedding deeply.
For customer-facing analytics, we eventually leaned toward building thin custom views on top of a metrics API / warehouse. More work upfront, but you control performance, access, and product experience.
The tradeoff is obvious, tools get you to v1 fast, custom gets you to v2+. If analytics is core to your product, I’d build. If it’s a feature, I’d buy and move on.
Early on, we used Metabase for speed. It’s great for internal dashboards and quick customer access, but starts to feel clunky once you care about UX, permissions, and embedding deeply.
For customer-facing analytics, we eventually leaned toward building thin custom views on top of a metrics API / warehouse. More work upfront, but you control performance, access, and product experience.
The tradeoff is obvious, tools get you to v1 fast, custom gets you to v2+. If analytics is core to your product, I’d build. If it’s a feature, I’d buy and move on.