Why Dashboard Embedding Is Best Served by Open Source
When you're building analytics into your product—whether it's customer-facing dashboards or internal tools—the technology choices you make today will shape your flexibility, costs, and capabilities for years to come. While proprietary BI tools promise convenience, open source solutions like Apache Superset™ offer something far more valuable: true ownership of your analytics stack.
Here's why open source is the superior choice for embedded analytics, and how managed services like Preset deliver the best of both worlds.
A Best-in-Class Ecosystem Without Vendor Lock-In
Open source thrives on interoperability. Apache Superset natively connects to virtually any database—PostgreSQL, Snowflake, BigQuery, Redshift, and dozens more. When new databases emerge, the community adds support quickly without waiting for vendor roadmaps.
Modern data stack integration is seamless. Tools like dbt and Cube work naturally with Superset because they're all built with openness in mind. dbt models flow directly into datasets. Cube's semantic layer enhances querying. These aren't afterthoughts—they're fundamental to how the ecosystem operates.
The alternative? Proprietary tools that lock you into walled gardens, charging premium prices for basic integrations or leaving you waiting years for the connectors you need.
Long-Term Data Strategy Ownership
Your data strategy is core to your business. Surrendering control of it to a proprietary vendor introduces risk that compounds over time.
No Vendor Lock-In: With open source, you own the deployment. You control the infrastructure. You decide when to upgrade, which features to enable, and how to configure every aspect of your analytics platform. If you ever need to move away from a managed service, you can—because the code is yours to run anywhere.
Future-Proofing Your Investment: Technology evolves rapidly. Business requirements change. Open source ensures you're never trapped by a vendor's technical debt or strategic pivots. If your managed service provider changes direction, raises prices, or discontinues features you rely on—you still have the source code and the community behind it.
Business Continuity: Proprietary vendors go out of business, get acquired, or shift their focus. When that happens with closed-source software, you're left scrambling. With open source, the community endures. Even if one company exits, others can step in. The code continues to live, evolve, and improve.
This isn't theoretical. We've seen countless companies migrate away from legacy BI tools precisely because they found themselves trapped—unable to adapt to new requirements without incurring massive costs or completely rebuilding their analytics infrastructure.
Price Assurance and Transparent Scaling
One of the most painful surprises in enterprise software is the unexpected price increase. With proprietary BI tools, success can actually become a liability.
Predictable Economics: Open source gives you control over your budget. Whether you self-host or use a managed service, you understand exactly what you're paying for. With Preset, embedding comes with clear, per-user pricing and no variable charges that spike as your usage grows.
No Surprise Charges: Remember Power BI's Premium capacity charges that organizations didn't see coming? Or Tableau's per-user pricing that makes wide embedding prohibitively expensive? Open source eliminates these traps. You're not at the mercy of a vendor's pricing model that treats your success as an opportunity to extract more revenue.
Scale on Your Terms: As your embedded dashboards reach more users—whether that's 100 or 100,000—you control how to scale infrastructure and what that costs. With Preset's managed service, scaling is handled automatically, but the pricing remains transparent. You're never penalized for embedding more dashboards or reaching more users.
The managed service model with Preset also means you're not carrying the operational burden of running the infrastructure yourself. But unlike proprietary solutions, you're also not trapped. The underlying technology is Apache Superset—proven, battle-tested, and available for you to run anywhere if your needs change.
Security and Compliance—Built In, Not Bolted On
When you're embedding dashboards externally—making them the value layer your customers actually consume—security isn't optional. It's mission-critical.
Audit the Code: With open source, you can inspect every line of code. Security teams can verify exactly how authentication works, how data is accessed, and where potential vulnerabilities might exist. There's no black box. No "trust us" from a vendor. You—or security professionals you trust—can review it all.
Custom Security Implementations: Every organization has unique security requirements. Open source allows you to implement custom security measures, add additional authentication layers, or integrate with specialized security tools without waiting for vendor support or paying for custom development.
Compliance Standards: For regulated industries—healthcare, finance, government—being able to demonstrate exactly how data flows through your systems is essential. Open source provides that transparency. When using Preset's managed service, you also get SOC2 Type 2 certification and PCI-DSS compliance out of the box, meeting enterprise security requirements while maintaining the flexibility of open source.
Row-Level Security (RLS): Controlling what data different users can see is fundamental to embedded analytics. Superset's RLS capabilities are sophisticated, allowing you to define fine-grained permissions programmatically. With Preset Embedded, you control these rules entirely—defining access restrictions during guest token generation, ensuring your customers only see their data.
The embedded experience with Preset is designed with security first. Dashboards render in iframes without cookie access. Your existing Preset session doesn't carry over. The embedded guest token is the sole authorization method—clean, controlled, and secure.
Customization and White-Labeling Without Restrictions
When you're embedding analytics into your application, it needs to feel native. Your customers shouldn't know (or care) what BI tool is running underneath.
Deep Customization: Open source allows complete customization of the user interface. Change colors, adjust layouts, modify components—everything is possible. Your embedded dashboards can match your brand identity perfectly, from color schemes to fonts to interaction patterns.
No License Restrictions: Many proprietary tools limit white-labeling to enterprise tiers or charge additional fees for removing their branding. With open source, these restrictions don't exist. The dashboards are yours to customize as you see fit.
With Preset, you get the additional advantage of managed infrastructure with SLA guarantees and release assurances—but you retain the ability to customize and white-label your embedded experience. The managed service handles the complexity of scaling, security, and maintenance while you focus on delivering value to your users.
Community Support and Transparency
One of open source's most underestimated advantages is the community—thousands of developers, data professionals, and organizations collaborating to solve problems and improve the software.
Collective Knowledge: When you encounter an issue with Superset, chances are someone else has already solved it. The community forums, GitHub issues, Stack Overflow discussions, and blog posts create a vast knowledge base. Solutions are shared openly, not locked behind vendor support tiers.
Visible Roadmap: Open source projects develop their roadmaps in public. You can see what features are being considered, join discussions about priorities, and even contribute code or ideas. Compare this to proprietary vendors where roadmaps are opaque, and customer feedback often disappears into a black hole.
Faster Bug Fixes: When bugs are identified, the community often produces fixes rapidly. Multiple organizations might independently work on solutions, and the best approach gets merged. This is fundamentally different from waiting months (or years) for a vendor's support team to prioritize your issue.
Shared Innovation: The open source model means improvements benefit everyone. When Preset develops new features for Apache Superset, they're contributed back to the community. When another organization solves a complex problem, you benefit from their work. This collective effort accelerates innovation far beyond what any single proprietary vendor could achieve.
Future-Proofing Through Innovation and AI Integration
Technology doesn't stand still. The analytics landscape is evolving rapidly, particularly with AI and machine learning becoming central to how we interact with data.
Rapid Innovation Cycles: Open source projects often innovate faster than proprietary alternatives because they're not constrained by corporate roadmaps, sales cycles, or legacy codebases. New capabilities can be prototyped, tested, and deployed quickly.
AI's Open Source Advantage: Here's something many people haven't fully grasped yet: AI models are being trained on open source code. They've absorbed every line of Apache Superset's codebase, every GitHub issue, every design discussion, and every architectural decision. When you ask a foundation model about Superset, it knows the obscure edge cases fixed in 2020, the migration bugs from version 0.37, the architectural tradeoffs debated at 2AM in GitHub comments. This knowledge is baked into the model's weights—not retrieved from a vector database, but fundamentally embedded in how the AI understands and reasons about the software.
Now ask that same model about a proprietary BI tool's codebase. The response will be silence. Proprietary vendors are invisible to the AI models reshaping how we build software. They're flying blind while open source rides the wave of AI-assisted development.
As we've discussed elsewhere, this advantage is only accelerating. AI agents are naturally drawn to code they can crawl, reason over, simulate against, and extend. Open source projects become training scaffolds, continuously improving as the models improve. Every contribution makes the next generation of AI assistance more capable.
Access to Cutting-Edge Features: With open source, you don't have to wait for a vendor's annual release cycle to access new capabilities. Features are available as soon as they're developed and tested, and you decide when to adopt them.
Community-Driven AI Integration: As AI capabilities mature, the open source community will integrate them into projects like Superset faster and more thoughtfully than proprietary vendors. These integrations will be transparent, customizable, and available to everyone—not locked behind premium tiers.
Multi-Tenancy and Scalability—Battle-Tested at Scale
Embedding analytics means handling complex multi-tenant scenarios where different customers need isolated, performant access to their data.
Proven Patterns: Because Apache Superset is used by thousands of organizations—from startups to Fortune 500 companies—the multi-tenancy patterns are battle-tested. The community has collectively solved the hard problems of scaling, performance optimization, and tenant isolation.
Flexible Architecture: Open source allows you to architect your deployment however makes sense for your use case. Whether you need separate instances per customer, shared infrastructure with RLS, or a hybrid approach, the flexibility exists to implement what works best.
Preset Makes It Easier: While the open source foundation provides the capability, Preset's managed service makes multi-tenancy dramatically simpler. The infrastructure automatically scales based on demand. Security and isolation are handled out of the box. You get enterprise-grade multi-tenancy without the operational complexity of building and maintaining it yourself.
The patterns for handling multi-tenant workloads, managing resource allocation, and ensuring performance isolation are all available in the open source codebase and community knowledge base. This means you're building on proven foundations rather than figuring it out from scratch.
Quick Time to Value
Beyond the strategic advantages of open source, there's the practical question: How quickly can you actually deploy embedded dashboards?
Rapid Setup: Dashboard embedding with Superset can be operational remarkably quickly. The Preset Embedded SDK streamlines the process, and the entire embedding workflow can be launched in under a sprint.
No User Management Overhead: Unlike traditional BI tools that require managing users within the BI platform itself, embedding with Preset uses guest token generation. Your application handles authentication, and Preset handles authorization through the generated tokens. This means you're not duplicating user management or synchronizing users between systems.
Simple Integration: The technical integration is straightforward: install the SDK, generate guest tokens with appropriate permissions, and embed the iframe. Developers familiar with modern web applications can implement the integration quickly without specialized BI expertise.
Flexible Access Control: Access control is programmatic and flexible. When generating the guest token, you define which dashboards users can access and what RLS rules apply. It's clean, code-driven, and easily integrated into your existing authorization logic.
Why Preset Is the Best of Both Worlds
Let's be clear about something: running production infrastructure is hard. Running a production analytics platform at scale—with security, compliance, performance, and reliability requirements—is even harder.
While Apache Superset is open source and free to deploy, most organizations find that the operational burden of self-hosting production analytics isn't where they want to invest their engineering resources.
This is precisely where Preset shines. You get all the advantages of open source—no vendor lock-in, transparent pricing, ecosystem integration, community innovation—plus the benefits of a managed service:
- Automatic Scaling: Infrastructure scales dynamically based on demand.
- Security Certifications: SOC2 Type 2, PCI-DSS compliance out of the box.
- SLA Guarantees: Uptime and performance commitments that self-hosting can't match without significant investment.
- Release Assurance: Tested, vetted updates without the risk of breaking changes disrupting your operations.
- Expert Support: Access to the team that built and maintains Apache Superset.
Preset handles the operational complexity so your team can focus on building value for your customers. But unlike proprietary solutions, you're never trapped. The underlying technology is Apache Superset—proven, widely adopted, and available for you to run anywhere if your needs change.
The Bottom Line: Open Source Is the Foundation for Modern Embedded Analytics
If you're building embedded analytics into your product, the question isn't whether to choose open source—it's whether you can afford not to.
Open source provides the ecosystem integration, pricing transparency, security control, customization flexibility, and future-proofing that embedded analytics demands. The community support and AI-era advantages make the gap between open source and proprietary solutions wider every day.
And with managed services like Preset, you're not choosing between open source principles and operational excellence. You get both.
The next generation of embedded analytics is being built on open source foundations. Companies that recognize this early will have more flexible, cost-effective, and innovative analytics capabilities than those locked into proprietary solutions.
