Claude Dashboards vs Shaper
Shaper is an open source dashboarding product. Now Anthropic released Claude Dashboards. What does that mean for Shaper?
The last days everyone on Data Analytics LinkedIn has been talking about how Claude Dashboards just killed the need for BI software.
This whole discussion only partially affects Shaper though: The Business Intelligence market has been crowded even two years ago when I started building Shaper.
Shaper never tried to compete with traditional BI tooling:
The problem Shaper solves:
- You want to share dashboards and reports with customers,
- but you are working with sensitive personal data that must stay in-house,
- and you need to be able to verify and audit results for correctness.
That’s why Shaper:
- focuses on embedded analytics,
- is fully open source and runs in your infrastructure,
- and defines dashboards as SQL code you store in Git.
None of these problems are solved by Claude Dashboards or the tools that came before it. I don’t expect that any healthcare company or finance org I work with to be willing to send PII to Claude or share AI generated dashboards with customers without a review process to approve the underlying analytics. Claude Dashboards looks like a great tool to query less critical data and to prototype dashboards before letting Claude translate them into Shaper SQL.
If you like to Shaper and want the ease of Claude to generate dashboards, checkout how to use our AI Agent Workflow to generate dashboards with Claude Code.