5 Mistakes SaaS Teams Make When Choosing a Dashboard Builder

Published May 10, 2025 | 3 minute read
Written by Lane Goedhart

For most SaaS teams, dashboards feel like a late-game feature — something to bolt on once the core product is live and customers start asking for reporting.

But choosing the wrong dashboard builder early on can quietly slow your roadmap, frustrate your users, and lock your team into expensive workarounds.

Whether you're building internal dashboards for your team or embedded dashboards for your customers, the tool you choose matters more than you think. Here are five common mistakes we’ve seen — and how to avoid them.

1. Choosing a Tool That Wasn’t Built for Embedding

Many dashboard tools are great for internal use, but terrible for embedding.

You’ll know you’ve picked the wrong one when:

  • The design doesn't match your product

  • It lives in an iframe with janky UX

  • Every customer sees the same data unless you hack in filters

  • Your dev team is spending time reverse-engineering access controls

What you actually need is a tool designed with multi-tenancy, customization, and security from day one. Look for built-in support for things like parameter signing and white-labeled dashboards — not just “embed” as an afterthought.

2. Overlooking Non-Technical Users

Founders often pick dashboard tools that they or their engineers can use. But those aren't always the same tools your growth lead, CS manager, or marketing ops person will want.

If you want velocity across your team, your dashboard tool needs to be simple, visual, and low-friction — not another interface that requires technical onboarding or SQL knowledge.

If only one person on your team can build or change dashboards, you're back in a bottleneck. The right tool expands access, not limits it.

3. Paying for Features You Don’t Use (Yet)

A lot of BI tools are built for enterprise use. They come packed with features you’ll never need as a startup, and they price accordingly.

Things like OLAP cubes, data prep pipelines, and custom theming for every chart type sound useful, but they often hide complex setup requirements and premium pricing tiers.

Make sure you're not committing to a tool where:

  • You need an engineer to make changes

  • You’re paying thousands per month for 2 features you use

  • Upgrades are required just to unlock basic functionality like row-level access

Early-stage teams need simplicity, not stack bloat.

4. Assuming “Internal = Good Enough”

Maybe you started building dashboards in Looker, Metabase, or Retool. They’re great for internal analytics. The temptation is to embed that same internal view into your customer-facing experience.

But internal dashboards are built differently:

  • They load slower

  • They show too much information

  • They don’t follow your product’s design or UX

  • They rely on team-specific naming or metrics

Your customers don’t want your team’s dashboard. They want a focused, clear view of what matters to them. That means dedicated customer-facing dashboards — not internal tools repackaged.

5. Ignoring Scale and Multi-Tenant Complexity

It’s easy to manage 3 or 4 clients manually. But what happens when you have 30? Or 300?

If your dashboard tool doesn’t support multi-tenant filtering out of the box, your team will be stuck:

  • Cloning dashboards for each customer

  • Managing separate views, permissions, and logic

  • Making the same change in 15 places

And if you're not using signed parameters or access scoping, you're one misconfigured dashboard away from a security incident.

Scaling dashboards without multi-tenancy is like building a house on sand. It works, until it doesn’t.

Dashboards Are a Product Decision

Dashboards aren’t just a bonus feature. They’re often the moment your user sees value. They help onboard new customers, surface ROI, and prove your product works.

Picking the right dashboard builder is more than a tech decision — it’s a product decision. One that can help you move faster, serve more users, and ship with confidence.

At Lemonado, we’ve built our dashboard platform specifically for fast-moving SaaS teams who want embedded, secure, and AI-powered dashboards — without the bloat or price tag.

If that sounds like what you're building, try it for free and get your first customer-facing dashboard live in minutes.

Get access