How do you create dashboards for your customers?

Discussions
#1

Hi there,

I am running a saas app and I want my customers to have a dashboard inside their account showing relevant information to them.

For example how many leads they have generated, emails have been send out, number of clicks on a CTA button etc. So its a mix of data coming for different areas of the product that I would like to show over time (nice chats, KPIs,…)

Now I am facing the typical question of “make or buy”:

  • Make: I would have to query my databases, possibly aggregate data and collect events across the product. Also I would have to use some chart.js to build the dashboard in the frontend.

  • Buy: I have to find a tool/service that collects my data and offers me a good integration API to display it in the customers account dashboard page.

I suppose I am not the only one having a customer facing dashboard.
So what solution (make/buy) did you pick for your app and what was the reason? Any recommendations?

Thanks!
Alex

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#2

I’ve created the customer dashboard in Feature Upvote (my B2B SaaS) manually. It could be better (as some customers tell me), but it could be much worse!

I didn’t even consider buying a ready-made solution because I wasn’t aware that such a thing existed. Do you know anyone? If so, I’m keen to check them out.

I probably would have built it myself anyway. That’s because it is a key part of our app, and something we want to have fine control over appearance and functionality.

#3

Hey Steve,

thanks for the reply. I found something but it looks a bit enterprise/expensive to me https://keen.io/ Not sure if you could have done your dashboard with their api.

Would be nice to get some hints from other people. Anyone? :slight_smile:

#4

This may or may not be a relevant answer but TrafficParrot creates a separate Trello board for each beta customer to track the status of major enhancements and new features as they are tested internally, deployed, and then reviewed / evaluated by beta customers to see if they are ready for prime time.

#5

Thanks, maybe the title was a bit misleading. :grimacing:
But I don’t need a dashboard about my customers. The customer (my customer) should have a dashboard showing his metics. My app helps sending out voucher codes so my clients want to see how many codes they have send out each day etc. thru my app.

#6

Sorry I was not clear: a Trello board is shared with the each beta customer and acts as a shared “dashboard” for new feature development and testing status. I think it’s relevant but not exactly what you were looking for.

#7

Some BI tools like datastudio.google.com or analytics.zoho.com are dedicated to create dashboards, using various sources of data (incl. from pgsql / mysql).
They also let you embed their visualizations in html.
Granted, these are not aimed specifically at SaaS, but that could be a very effort-efficient way to create nice-looking dashboards — at least as a 1st step.

We wrote a quick introduction to Data Studio if you want to see what it is:

However, I agree with @SteveMcLeod that there could be value in doing your own dashboard — especially once your idea of what your dashboard should do has matured.

A good middle-ground could be to use ready-made dashboard themes, where all the visualizations and charts are already done, and you “just” have to plug in your data (which you’ll have to do somehow anyway).

E.g. Bootstrap proposes a lot of clean templates, in plain html or react / vue / etc.:

A quick search will give you a lot more options, depending on the CSS framework you’re already using, the price you’re willing to pay, etc.

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#8

I have dashboards in my system and I always created my own. There are some tools that could be used but they tend to be expensive and not really that easy to seamlessly integrate. They are enterprisey.