Insocial saves 1,100+ engineering hours with Metabase

The Challenge: Insocial needed a way to let customers explore their own survey results. The team first tried building reporting features in-house, but every client wanted different layouts, colors, and filters. It quickly became too complex to maintain, and the small team couldn’t keep up.

The Solution: Insocial embedded Metabase inside its platform. Customers now have a reporting tab where they can choose from pre-built templates, apply filters, and generate dashboards instantly. Reports cover things like employee satisfaction, survey response rates, and customer conversions.

The Results: Insocial’s customers now access Metabase dashboards each month. The team no longer spends hours building reports from scratch, and non-technical colleagues can create and manage dashboards themselves.

"Insocial saved over 1,100 hours by automating dashboard generation. "

Annemiek De Haan
Product Owner at Insocial

Insocial lets companies send surveys by email, WhatsApp, or text, then analyze the responses to improve services and experiences. Founded 12 years ago, Insocial has grown into a 25-person team serving more than 1,600 active users.

Why Metabase?

The team’s homegrown reporting system became a drain. Every request for new customization added more development work. They needed something easier to maintain that still gave customers flexibility.

Insocial compared other BI tools, including Power BI, but found Metabase’s embedded analytics smoother and faster to set up. The clean visuals were another deciding factor.

How Insocial team uses Metabase

Every Insocial customer can see their survey analytics in a reporting tab powered by Metabase’s Interactive Embedding feature.

Behind the scenes, dashboards are provisioned automatically from templates. Customers can select from six standard report types, such as conversion dashboards, employee satisfaction reports, or weekly performance metrics. These dashboards can be filtered and explored interactively, with drill-downs available for deeper analysis.

The implementation

Insocial self-hosts Metabase, connects it to PostgreSQL and MySQL, and embeds it through a dedicated reporting tab. To manage dashboards at scale, the team built a lightweight API layer with OpenAPI that handles all communication with their Metabase instance.

Here’s how it works behind the scenes:

• When a new survey is created, the API provisions a dashboard from a template.
• Cards, layouts, and filters are generated programmatically and stored for reuse.
• Each survey is linked to its dashboard ID in Metabase. If a dashboard needs to be updated, the system automatically deletes and regenerates it.
• Dashboards can be embedded in app pages or exported as PDFs for reporting.

This setup allows Insocial to deliver survey-specific dashboards automatically, while keeping the process reliable and low-maintenance for the team.

The results

Metabase has become a core part of the Insocial platform. Customers get reporting that feels built-in. The Insocial team has reduced engineering load, saved time through automation, and empowered non-technical staff to contribute.

“Embedding with Metabase meant we could stop reinventing the wheel. Instead, we deliver professional, customizable reporting that our customers love,” says Annemiek.