InsightSoftware: Build vs. Buy Analytics: The Wrong Question for Modern Products

The age-old question: Build or Buy? On the one hand, you could build in-house for differentiation and tailored to your exact needs or buy for speed. But both approaches often introduce tradeoffs that slow delivery, inflate costs, and force architectural compromises that limit long-term value.

New research shows there’s a better way. According to insightsoftware’s 2025 ROI study with Hanover Research, 99% of organizations using embedded analytics see ROI within 12 months and 70% achieve returns in just 6 months.

In this session, we’ll examine the real economics of the build vs. buy decision using industry data and real-world application scenarios. You’ll learn why traditional “buy” options often fall short for product-led teams, and why fully custom builds frequently struggle to show ROI fast enough.

We’ll introduce a third approach: an embedded-first analytics architecture that delivers build-level flexibility without the build timeline. Drawing on research from 300 application teams, we’ll show how this model drives measurable business outcomes: 20% increases in monthly active users, 21% improvements in customer retention, and 20% reductions in support tickets.

Finally, we’ll demonstrate how Logi Symphony enables teams to design, extend, and monetize analytics as part of their product, while remaining deployable anywhere: cloud, on-premises, hybrid, or self-hosted.

What You’ll Learn:

• The hidden cost drivers behind build-from-scratch analytics initiatives
• Why off-the-shelf BI tools fail embedded, customer-facing use cases
• How embedded-first platforms accelerate ROI without sacrificing control
• Proven architectural patterns for delivering custom analytics at scale
• Why deployment flexibility is critical to long-term analytics ROI