Metabase is a good, popular open-source BI tool that anyone can quickly install on your local environment to get a simple BI system up and running.
Yet when your analytics needs grow, you might face some of these pain points when using Metabase:
The fastest, easiest way to share data and analytics inside your company. An open source Business Intelligence server you can install in 5 minutes that connects to MySQL, PostgreSQL, MongoDB and more! Anyone can use it to build charts, dashboards and nightly email reports. Click to select the IIS 6 Metabase Compatibility, IIS 6 WMI Compatibility, and IIS 6 Management Console check boxes. In the Select Role Services pane, click Next. In the Confirm Installations Selections pane, click Install. Click Close to exit the Add Role Services wizard. Metabase is bringing data tools with the elegance and simplicity of consumer products to the crufty world of enterprise business intelligence. Our Open Source analytics and business intelligence. Metabase is bringing data tools with the elegance and simplicity of consumer products to the crufty world of enterprise business intelligence. Our Open Source analytics and business intelligence application let installs in minutes, and can connect to most commonly used datab.
- Have your business users ever found Metabase’s “Ask a question” too limiting for complex queries, and end up coming back to the analytics team to ask for custom reports?
- Metabase only works well with a single SQL data source. If you have data from multiple sources, Metabase likely won't work well for you since it doesn't allow joining of data.
- With Metabase, you can only work directly with your database tables because everything in Metabase is designed for simplicity.
In this post, we'll share with you a few alternative options to that, and tell you which pain points of Metabase each of these alternative addresses. So depending on your needs you might be able to pick the right option to replace, or use alongside with Metabase.
The below list of options are only tools that eventually offer a drag-and-drop interface to end users. At the end of the post we also include a list of tools that is only designed for technical users, SQL-to-chart translation.
Holistics is a nice BI alternative to Metabase. It works similar to Metabase in a way that it allows you to map your database tables into models and relationships, and expose this to the end business users to 'self-service explore'.
Similars/Difference to Metabase:
- Both are built on top of SQL querying engine and both offers a drag-and-drop experience for non-technical users.
- Metabase fits only at at the visualization layer, Holistics offer additional ELT capabilities (data preparation).
Pros (compared to Metabase):
- A stronger data modeling layer that allows handling sophisticated raw data.
- Business users can ask more sophisticated questions using their Explore interface.
- Works well with non-SQL data sources as they offer a mini-ETL experience with common sources (MongoDB, Google Analytics, etc)
- Have an in-built DAG-like transformation layer so that you can transform raw data into aggregated datasets before exploration
- Cloud-based so it doesn't take time to setup.
Cons (compared to Metabase):
- Might not look as visually appealing as Metabase
Pricing:
- Free, paid plans start from $50-$500 per month.
Tableau is considered the best tool when it comes to visualization (prettiness) as it's their primary focus. Tableau is also recently acquired by Salesforce.
Similars or differences to Metabase:
- While Metabase translates everything to SQL, by default Tableau uses their in-memory datastore, making it more difficult to debug when things go wrong (you can't look at the SQL query to troubleshoot).
Pros (compared to Metabase):
- Pretty visualization (best in their class)
- Friendly for business users to build your own chartings
- Work with a wide range of data sources
Cons (compared to Metabase):
- To design charts effectively you need to use their Desktop version
Pricing:
- Based on user roles (Creator, Explorer, Viewer) with mimimum commitment required.
- They have a Free desktop version if you're publishing the reports publicly.
Coming out of Microsoft and with strong history of Excel and PowerPivot, PowerBI is a fine choice to replace Metabase. They also have ability to load custom visualization.
Similar/Difference from Metabase:
- While Metabase translates everything to SQL, by default PowerBI uses their in-memory datastore and their proprietary language DAX, making it more difficult to debug when things go wrong (you can't look at the SQL query to troubleshoot).
Pros (compared to Metabase):
- Their explorer interface is comprehensive for end-business users to work with.
- They offer from loading data from multiple sources, to drag-and-drop transform UI, to visualization.
Cons (compared to Metabase):
- We suspect if you're more inclined towards SQL-backed data reporting like Metabase, you might not like Microsoft-style, Excel-like, proprietary approach of PowerBI.
- PowerBI Editor can only run on Desktop running Windows. (that's why we wrote a post on how to use PowerBI on Mac devices)
- Their best practice require you to host your data into PowerBI servers, i.e duplicating your data into their server.
Pricing:
- Free for single user (desktop)
- $10 per user for small-scale shared resource deployment
- Starts to get fairly expensive for medium-to-large scale deployment (starts at $5K USD a month - listed price on website).
Looker (now part of Google) is quite a good BI tool to replace Metabase, but only if you're a big organization with large budget.
Pros (compared to Metabase):
- Have a custom-built DSL layer (called LookML) to perform mapping between database tables and business logic, thus it's more flexible and customizable.
- Have an in-built transformation layer so that you can transform raw data into aggregated datasets before exploration
- Cloud-based so it doesn't take time to setup (as compared to Metabase)
Cons (compared to Metabase):
- Since they use their own DSL language to model data, it takes quite a learning curve to get started.
- It's also expensive and meant for large-scale deployment
Pricing:
- Quite expensive, starting from $3000/month.
If you don't need self-service capabilities that Metabase offers for business users, you can also check out these tools:
- Redash (open-source SQL to chart tools)
- Cluvio (SQL to chart tool, paid offering with a free plan)
- Superset (opensource, SQL to chart tool, coming out of Airbnb)
- Mode Analytics (SQL to chart tool with paid offering)
Summary
Metabase offers an attractive looking visual SQL query building tool to serve ad hoc reporting and charting needs. InetSoft offers a completely customizable data visualization, analytics, dashboarding and reporting platform with a very strong data mashup and transformation engine.
Maturity of Code
InetSoft has 21 years of experience in business intelligence and reporting software development with sole control over source code. Metabase is a startup founded 3 years ago relying on the best efforts, open source model of code development.
Company Resources
InetSoft employee count is over 150. Metabase is under 10. InetSoft is profitable, self-funded, requiring no venture investment and control. Metabase is venture-backed with inherent uncertainty of future success or viability.
Production Reporting
InetSoft support pixel-perfect production reporting which covers the breadth of paginated reporting, burst generation, and automated distribution options. Metabase has no production or paginated reporting capabilities.
Dashboard Design
InetSoft's designer is a blank canvas for laying out any desired set of charts with precise control of all graphic elements. Metabase does not offer a designer, only a rudimentary method of saving and resizing charts to view again.
Visualization Interactivity
InetSoft supports many interactive data exploration controls to make one or more charts be filterable and explorable, such as range sliders, selection lists, calendar selectors, and brushing. Metabase supports none of these. Charts are single-purpose views that result from designing a specific question, which is a visual process of writing an SQL query. Limited filtering is possible only through a confined drop-down method.
Metabase Enterprise Cost
Archiving Reports, Dashboard Snapshots, Alerts, Chart and Data Exporting
Metabase Enterprise
InetSoft supports these. Metabase does not.
Advanced Chart Types
InetSoft supports many advanced chart types and options that Metabase does not, such as bullet charts, sparklines, histograms, top-n/bottom-n, custom maps, and conditional coloring.
Data Connectivity
Metabase connects to a handful of SQL-based sources and one Hadoop type. InetSoft connects to all of those plus many specialized enterprise application and cloud sources, plus spreadsheets, even those imported by end-users.
Access and Permissions
Metabase only supports Google SSO and table-level access control. InetSoft supports many standard SSOs such as Active Directory and LDAP or custom ones and cell-level access control.
Data Mashup
Metabase does not support data mashup and connects only to a single source. InetSoft connects to as many sources as desired and enables mashing up of data even when field types aren't exactly matching. Complex join types are supported.
Data Transformation
Metabase only supports simple expressions. InetSoft supports the entire library of functions Excel does plus any custom function or algorithm.
Database Writeback
InetSoft supports this. Metabase does not.
Machine Learning
InetSoft supports machine learning via Spark. Metabase does not.
Embeddability, Multi-tenancy, API
Github Metabase
InetSoft support a full range of embeddability from white-label OEM'ing with multi-tenancy and API access to displaying interactive visualizations in a portal. Metabase does not.
Metabase Source Code
Since 1996 InetSoft has been delivering easy, agile, and robust business intelligence software that makes it possible for organizations and solution providers of all sizes to deploy or embed full-featured business intelligence solutions. Application highlights include visually-compelling and interactive dashboards that ensure greater end-user adoption plus pixel-perfect report generation, scheduling, and bursting. InetSoft's patent pending Data Block™ technology enables productive reuse of queries and a unique capability for end-user defined data mashup.
This capability combined with efficient information access enabled by InetSoft's visual analysis technologies allows maximum self-service that benefits the average business user, the IT administrator, and the developer. InetSoft was rated #1 in Butler Analytics Business Analytics Yearbook, and InetSoft's BI solutions have been deployed at over 5,000 organizations worldwide, including 25% of Fortune 500 companies, spanning all types of industries.