Introduction
What is Golden Reports
An overview of the Golden Reports platform - what it is, who it's for, and how its pieces fit together.
Golden Reports is a multi-tenant reporting platform. Teams use it to design report templates once, hook them up to live data, and then run them - on demand, embedded in another product, or as exports triggered by a third-party system.
The platform is opinionated about separating four jobs that are often muddled together in legacy reporting tools:
| Job | Owned by | Where it happens |
|---|---|---|
| Design what the report looks like | Report author | The report editor (inside the Manager) |
| Decide what data is available | Data engineer | Data contexts (versioned schemas over connectors) |
| Configure where data physically lives | Platform admin | Data sources (connector instances) |
| Govern who can see what | Org admin | Workspaces & data access |
The same separation runs through the product: an author doesn't write SQL, a data engineer doesn't paint pages, and a platform admin doesn't choose fonts.
The surface you'll use
- The Manager is the web app you sign in to. Everything happens here: administering organizations, workspaces, data sources, data contexts, forms, themes, and reports - and authoring those reports in the embedded report editor.
That's it. The services that fetch data, render PDFs, and store reports are the platform's job, not yours.
What about the Studio?
You may see "Studio" mentioned in product communications - that's a standalone desktop application currently in development. It will share the same editor and the same documentation as the Manager. For now, all editing happens inside the Manager.
Who Golden Reports is for
If you author or operate reports. You want to produce well-designed PDFs, on-screen reports, or operational documents driven by live data. Templates are plain HTML + Liquid (no proprietary expression language to learn). The visual editor is built around drag-and-drop blocks for the harder parts - paginated tables, repeating page headers, charts, barcodes - and you can drop into the Code panel and write HTML directly whenever you need to.
If you build software that needs reports. You want a hosted reporting plane your customers can extend without you maintaining a templating engine. Reports can be embedded in your product, exported via the API, or rendered by your customer's own authors in a workspace you control.
If you operate the platform. You want a Kubernetes-native deployment with multi-tenant isolation, observability hooks, and a clean upgrade path. The official Helm chart deploys everything Golden Reports needs behind your existing ingress.
What you can do with Golden Reports
- Design pixel-accurate reports visually in the report editor. Templates are HTML + Liquid; a library of built-in blocks (tables, charts, KPIs, barcodes, QR codes, gauges, page headers and footers, and more) handles the harder reporting and print concerns.
- Query live data through a data context - a versioned GraphQL schema your authors write against without ever seeing the underlying databases.
- Export the same report to PDF, embed it in your product, or run it on demand from a third-party system.
- Reuse themes, assets, and connectors across an entire organization.
- Self-host the whole stack with the official Helm chart, or run it as a managed service.
- Extend the platform with custom blocks and custom data connectors.
What's in this docs site
These docs cover product concepts, workflows, operational concerns, and extension development. They're written for two audiences:
- Report authors and operators - most of what you need is in Building reports, Data, and Collaboration.
- Engineers and platform owners - Architecture, Self-hosting, and Building extensions are written for you.
For programmatic integration - GraphQL schema, embed URLs, SDK references, and any other API-shaped material - see the separate Developer Portal. Everything else lives here.
Next
Continue to Core concepts to learn the vocabulary, then walk through the Quick start.