What is embedded analytics?
A short, practical guide to sharing dashboards with customers, partners and teams: what it is, how it works and what it costs.
The short answer
Embedded analytics means showing dashboards inside another application or a branded portal. Instead of sending people to a separate BI tool, they see the data where they already work, under your brand, with access limited to their own data.
How it works
Dashboards are built in a BI tool such as Power BI, Tableau, Amazon QuickSight, Looker, Domo or Metabase. When a viewer opens a page, the portal or app signs them in, works out which data they may see, and asks the BI tool for a secure, short-lived view of the dashboard filtered to that data.
What you need around the dashboard
- Sign-in for viewers, by email invite or single sign-on
- Row-level security so each customer or region sees only their rows
- Branding, a custom domain and emails from your own address
- Navigation that groups dashboards, files and links
- Exports and scheduled delivery
- Usage analytics and an audit log
Common use cases
Customer portals in SaaS products, client reporting for agencies and consultancies, partner and supplier sharing, franchise reporting, and internal portals for departments.
Six steps to share dashboards externally
Pick the dashboards to share
Start with the few dashboards customers or partners ask for most.
Decide who sees what
List the viewer groups and the field that separates their data, such as customer ID or region.
Choose how viewers sign in
Email invites for small groups, SSO for larger organizations.
Choose an embedding method
Native embedding from your BI tool, a portal product such as EmbedPortal, or your own build.
Brand it
Your logo, colors and domain so the portal looks like part of your product.
Measure usage
Track logins and views so you know which dashboards matter.
Embedded analytics questions
What is embedded analytics?
Embedded analytics means showing dashboards and reports inside another application or a branded portal, so people see data where they already work instead of logging in to a separate BI tool.
What is the difference between embedded analytics and a BI tool?
A BI tool is where analysts build dashboards. Embedded analytics is how those dashboards are delivered to other people, inside your app or portal, with your branding and access rules.
How do you share Power BI dashboards with external users?
The common options are guest access in Microsoft Entra ID, publish to web (public, not secure), or embedding on Fabric or Power BI Embedded capacity. Embedding on capacity lets external viewers see reports without Pro licenses, with row-level security per customer.
How do you keep each customer's data separate?
With row-level security. Each viewer is mapped to values such as a customer ID, and the BI tool filters the data to those rows every time the dashboard loads.
Should we build an embedded analytics portal ourselves?
Embedding one dashboard is quick. The work is everything around it: logins, SSO, row-level security per tenant, branding, token refresh, exports and audit logs. Teams build this when they need full control, and use a portal product when they want to launch faster.
How much does embedded analytics cost?
It depends on the BI tool's licensing model (per user, per session or capacity) plus the cost of the portal around it. EmbedPortal plans are flat, starting at $249 a month billed annually, with unlimited viewers.
Share your first dashboard today
14-day free trial. Unlimited viewers on every plan.