Metabase

Self-serve dashboards over your business data that let anyone on the team ask a question in plain English and get a chart back, built on the most widely used open-source BI tool.

Records & databases Apps

Checked 25 Sep 2026

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What you'd use it for

Letting anyone on the team ask a plain-English question about the business's numbers and get a chart back, without learning SQL first.

Ask a question in plain English and get a chart or table back, no SQL needed
Drop into the raw SQL editor when a question is too specific for the point-and-click builder
Connect 20+ databases and warehouses (Postgres, MySQL, Snowflake, BigQuery and others) as one place to query from
Build a dashboard from several saved questions and share it with the team or embed it for customers
Schedule a dashboard to land in email or Slack on a recurring basis, or get alerted when a number crosses a threshold

The verdict

Metabase earns its reputation as the default open-source BI tool because the free Open Source edition is genuinely unlimited rather than a crippled trial, and the plain-English question builder gets a non-technical user to a real chart quickly. The trade-off is that free means unmanaged — someone still has to run, patch and back up the server — and Cloud pricing climbs sharply once SSO or customer-facing embeds enter the picture. It suits a team that already has clean data sitting in a proper database and wants a shared way to query it, not a team still living in spreadsheets.

What it costs

Tier	Price	For	Includes
Open Source	$0	A team wanting unlimited users on core analytics with no seat cost.	AI-assisted question asking and SQL generation, 20+ supported data sources, unlimited questions and dashboards, SQL or click-based exploration.
Starter	$100/month ($90/month billed annually, $1,080/year); first 5 users included, additional users $6/month ($65/year)	A small team needing real support and a handful more users than Open Source comfortably manages.	All Open Source features plus 3-day support via email, support form, Slack or Teams.
Pro	$575/month ($517.50/month billed annually, $6,210/year); first 10 users included, additional users $12/month ($130/year)	Teams needing row-level permissions, SSO, and embedded analytics for customers.	All Starter features plus row and column-level permissions, SSO, caching controls, usage analytics and auditing, multi-tenant embedded analytics, whitelabel capability.
Enterprise	Custom pricing, starting around $20,000/year	Large organisations with specialised deployment and support needs.	All Pro features plus a dedicated success engineer, a 1-day support SLA, air-gap deployment.

Read from Metabase's own pricing page on 25 Sep 2026. Vendors change prices without notice.

What you need to start

A database or spreadsheet-backed data source to connect once you're past the sample data
For self-hosting, a server able to run Java 25 or Docker, plus a production database such as Postgres or MySQL

Metabase Cloud gets you a working account and a connected database in minutes; self-hosting needs a server running Java 25 (or a Docker host) plus a production database such as Postgres or MySQL before it's ready for real use.

Your first run The setup wizard has you create an admin account, then either connect your own database or defer that and explore the bundled sample database straight away; Metabase's own tutorials put a first working dashboard about 30 minutes out.

Where it breaks

Self-hosted (Open Source, free forever) or Metabase Cloud (hosted, the paid tiers above). The self-hosted route requires someone to run and maintain the server yourself.

First entry in this reference. There is no previous check to compare it against.

When not to use it

A business whose numbers still live in scattered spreadsheets rather than a real database should look elsewhere first — Metabase queries existing data, it doesn't organise it for you. It also isn't for a founder unwilling to either run a server themselves or pay for Cloud, or for a team that needs the full semantic-modelling depth of a Looker or Tableau.

Metabase’s core promise is that someone without SQL should be able to ask “what were our top products last month” and get a real chart back, built on top of your actual production data rather than a copy someone maintains in a spreadsheet. It reports over 60,000 organisations running it, which makes it the most widely used open-source business intelligence tool by a wide margin — the free, self-hosted Open Source edition alone covers unlimited users and unlimited dashboards.

That free tier is not a crippled trial version, either — it includes the AI-assisted natural-language querying and SQL generation, not just a paid add-on. The paid Cloud tiers exist for teams that want Metabase run for them, plus the governance features (row-level permissions, SSO, audit logs) that matter once a dashboard reaches beyond a small internal team.

Self-hosted versus Cloud is the real decision

Because Open Source is genuinely free with no artificial seat cap, the first real question is not which tier to pick but whether you want to run the server yourself. Self-hosting costs nothing in licensing but needs someone to deploy, patch and back it up; Metabase Cloud starts at $100/month and removes that operational burden, with the price climbing sharply at Pro once you need customer-facing embedded dashboards or SSO.

Against a heavier BI platform like Looker or Tableau, Metabase’s argument is simplicity: it is built to get a non-technical team asking its own questions quickly, not to model a data warehouse’s full semantic layer.

Alternatives

Records & databasesApps

Microsoft Power BI

Turns spreadsheets and connected business systems into interactive dashboards, with Copilot answering questions about the data in plain English instead of a formula.

Checked 25 Sep 2026

Records & databasesApps

Airtable

A database that looks like a spreadsheet, with an API, forms, views and AI fields on top — the place most small businesses end up keeping the records an automation needs to read and write.

Checked 15 Sep 2026

Websites & appsHarness

Retool

Assembles internal admin tools and dashboards directly over your existing databases, with AI able to generate the interface from a description instead of you dragging every component by hand.

Checked 25 Sep 2026