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Business Intelligence · head to head

DashThis vs Envoy

DashThis logo

DashThis

Business Intelligence

Fixed-price marketing dashboards for agencies billed by dashboard, not by seat

From
$44/month
Free plan
No
Visit DashThisFull review
Envoy logo

Envoy

Developer Tools

A high-performance L7 proxy written in C++ that is configured by an API rather than a config file, and is usually deployed under a control plane.

From
Free
Free plan
Yes
Visit EnvoyFull review

The short version

  • Envoy is free; DashThis starts at $44/mo.
  • Only DashThis lists unlimited users; only Envoy lists xDS dynamic configuration.
  • Where DashThis falls short: there is no free tier at all, and the fourteen day trial is short for an agency wanting to rebuild forty client reports before committing.
  • Prices and features on this page were last checked on 13 November 2026.

Where they differ

Only the attributes on which DashThis and Envoy actually diverge.

Attributes where DashThis and Envoy differ
AttributeDashThisEnvoy
Starting price$44/monthFree
Pricing modelPer month by dashboard countOpen-source
Free tierNoYes
CategoryBusiness IntelligenceDeveloper Tools

Identical on both: platforms (Web).

What each one covers

Drawn from each product's published feature list. An absence here means we hold no record of it - not that the product lacks it.

Only in DashThis

  • Unlimited users
  • Preset templates
  • Multi-source widgets
  • Calculated widgets
  • White labelling
  • Scheduled delivery
  • Data source library
  • Comment annotations

Only in Envoy

  • xDS dynamic configuration
  • Protocol breadth
  • Filter chain architecture
  • Observability by default
  • Outlier detection
  • Traffic shaping
  • mTLS termination and origination
  • Hot restart

What people use each for

The jobs each tool is most often brought in to do.

DashThis

  • A twenty-person agency that wants every account manager and every client to have a login without per-seat billingnot Envoy
  • A PPC team producing the same monthly report for forty accounts and wanting it emailed automaticallynot Envoy
  • An in-house marketing lead who needs one cross-channel view for the board without involving a data teamnot Envoy
  • An SEO consultancy white labelling client reports under its own domain and sending addressnot Envoy

Envoy

  • Acting as the data plane under a service mesh or Gateway API implementation, which is how the overwhelming majority of deployments use itnot DashThis
  • An edge or API gateway that needs per-route retry budgets, circuit breaking and outlier detection rather than round-robin proxyingnot DashThis
  • Migrating traffic between service versions or between a monolith and its replacement, using weighted splits and shadow trafficnot DashThis
  • Standardising observability across a polyglot estate, so that latency, error rates and tracing look the same regardless of the language a service is written innot DashThis

Where each one falls short

Documented limitations, not opinions. Every one is a constraint you would hit in normal use.

DashThis

  • Dashboards are the billing unit, so an agency that gives each client a summary and a channel detail view consumes its allowance at twice the expected rate and upgrades jump by roughly a hundred dollars a step
  • There is no data warehouse, SQL layer or real data modelling, so anything requiring joins beyond simple multi-source widgets has to be done in another tool first
  • Historical data depends on what each connected API will return, so switching to DashThis does not retroactively give you years of comparable history
  • There is no free tier at all, and the fourteen day trial is short for an agency wanting to rebuild forty client reports before committing
  • Visualisation options are limited to a fixed widget set, so clients who want a specific chart type or layout often cannot get it

Envoy

  • The configuration surface is very large and hand-written bootstrap YAML runs to hundreds of lines for routing that Nginx expresses in twenty, which is why nearly every production deployment sits under a control plane and inherits that control plane's constraints as well
  • xDS is the real API and it is not stable in the comfortable sense; the v2 API set was removed outright, resource types continue to be deprecated, and your control plane and Envoy binaries have to be upgraded roughly in step or the proxies stop accepting configuration
  • Extending it properly means writing a C++ filter and building and maintaining your own Envoy binary; the alternatives are Lua, which adds per-request overhead, and proxy-wasm, whose ABI has remained effectively experimental for years with a real performance cost
  • At sidecar density the per-proxy memory and CPU footprint is a measurable share of cluster capacity, since thousands of workloads each carry a full proxy, and this is precisely the cost that has pushed mesh projects towards node-level or ambient architectures
  • There is no single vendor selling support for Envoy itself; you get the community plus control-plane vendors such as Solo.io and Tetrate, so an Envoy-level production bug is your own engineers in a C++ codebase unless a support contract happens to cover it
  • Diagnosing why a request got a particular response involves reading config dumps, the stats endpoint and the RESPONSE_FLAGS codes in access logs rather than a readable error, which is a specific skill you must hire or spend months growing

Pricing, plan by plan

DashThis

$44/month
  • Individual$44/mo
    • 3 dashboards
    • 15 data sources
    • Unlimited users
  • Professional$139/mo
    • 10 dashboards
    • 40 data sources
    • Unlimited users
  • Business$279/mo
    • 25 dashboards
    • 100 data sources
    • Unlimited users
  • Standard$429/mo
    • 50 dashboards
    • 200 data sources
    • Unlimited users

Envoy

Free

No published plan breakdown. See the Envoy review.

Which should you pick?

Choose DashThis if

  • You need unlimited users.
  • You also want preset templates.
DashThis review

Choose Envoy if

  • You need xds dynamic configuration.
  • You want to start without paying.
  • You also want protocol breadth.
Envoy review

Questions people ask

Is DashThis or Envoy better?
Neither clearly leads. DashThis starts at $44/month and Envoy at Free, and user ratings are close enough to be indistinguishable. Choose on capability and platform support.
Which is cheaper, DashThis or Envoy?
Envoy has a free tier; the other does not. Paid plans start at $44/month for DashThis and Free for Envoy.
Does DashThis or Envoy run on more platforms?
Both run on Web, so platform support will not decide this one for you.
Can I use Envoy for free?
Yes. Envoy has a free tier, so you can try it without paying. DashThis starts at $44/month.
What is DashThis best used for?
DashThis is most often used for a twenty-person agency that wants every account manager and every client to have a login without per-seat billing, a ppc team producing the same monthly report for forty accounts and wanting it emailed automatically, an in-house marketing lead who needs one cross-channel view for the board without involving a data team, an seo consultancy white labelling client reports under its own domain and sending address. Of those, a twenty-person agency that wants every account manager and every client to have a login without per-seat billing and a ppc team producing the same monthly report for forty accounts and wanting it emailed automatically are not what Envoy is typically brought in for.
What can DashThis do that Envoy cannot?
DashThis covers Unlimited users, Preset templates, Multi-source widgets, Calculated widgets. Envoy covers xDS dynamic configuration, Protocol breadth, Filter chain architecture, Observability by default.

Answered from the vendors’ own pages

DashThis: Does DashThis charge per user?

No. Every plan includes unlimited users and client viewers; you pay for dashboards and data sources.

Envoy: Should I run Envoy on its own, or under a control plane?

Almost always under one. Directly authoring xDS or static bootstrap configuration is viable for a handful of routes and becomes unmanageable beyond that. Envoy Gateway, Istio, Contour, Gloo and Consul all exist to generate that configuration for you.

DashThis: Is there a free plan?

No. Pricing starts at 44 US dollars a month for three dashboards, after a short trial.

Envoy: How does it compare with Nginx or HAProxy?

Envoy is dynamically configured over an API and instrumented far more heavily; Nginx and HAProxy are faster to configure and lighter for straightforward reverse proxying. If you never need to change routing without a reload, Envoy is more machinery than the problem requires.

DashThis: Can I blend data from several ad accounts?

Yes, through multi-source widgets and calculated widgets, but there is no general purpose join or SQL layer.

Envoy: What does it cost?

Nothing to licence; it is Apache 2.0 and there is no paid edition. The cost is engineering time and, for most organisations, a commercial control plane or cloud service that packages it.

DashThis: Does it white label fully?

Yes, including logo, colours, sending email address and a custom domain on the higher plans.

Envoy: Can I write extensions without C++?

You can write Lua filters or proxy-wasm modules in Rust, Go, C++ or AssemblyScript. Both carry per-request overhead compared with a native filter, and the Wasm path has been slower to stabilise than the project originally projected.

Envoy: Is it a CNCF project?

Yes, it is a graduated CNCF project licensed under Apache 2.0, which means the trademark and governance sit with the foundation rather than with Lyft or any vendor.

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