When it comes to building analytics modules, product engineers often face a hard choice.
You could build a custom solution, but that comes with ongoing costs, complexity, and a significant time investment. Alternatively, you could choose an off-the-shelf BI tool, but these often don't align with your (engineering's) need for strong governance, robust software development process, or maintaining your product's unique look and feel.
BI tools were originally designed for analysts supporting internal stakeholders, not for product teams building solutions for external users. In response to customer demands, many BI tools simply add an authentication wrapper around their dashboards and repurpose them for customers' analytics.
While this delivers the basic analytics requirement, they soon fall short in UX and governance standards that product engineering teams demand:
They don't support the software development process that engineers require (e.g Git-based with CI/CD). They support a pure GUI-based development interface, which is quick to get started, but soon face limitations in term of flexibility, look & feel, and long-term maintenance.
We learnt that product engineers want their embedded analytics experience to function like a software development process, rather than conforming to a typical analytics workflow.
That's why we built Holistics Embedding—to eliminate this difficult tradeoff for product engineers, allowing them to integrate analytics without compromising on development best practices and production-grade user experience.