Metabase Alternatives

Power BI is Microsoft's business intelligence suite. You build reports in Power BI Desktop, model the data with relationships and DAX measures, then publish them to the Power BI service where colleagues read, filter and subscribe to them. Where Metabase starts from a question asked of one database, Power BI starts from a data model that joins several sources, including Excel files, SharePoint lists and Dynamics. That is the usual reason to move to it: the questions got harder, the data lives in more places, and the company already pays Microsoft.

How the price reads against Metabase: Power BI counts users who create or read shared content, with no instance fee. The Free account builds reports in Desktop but cannot share them; you upgrade to Pro or Premium to share. Pro costs $14 per user a month, paid yearly, and Premium Per User $24. On yearly billing, a 20 person team pays $3,360 a year on Pro, against $2,055 on Metabase Starter and $7,510 on Metabase Pro, which is where row level security sits.

Tip: count readers, not just authors. Pro is the license that lets a colleague access reports shared with them, so 5 analysts and 45 readers on Pro cost $700 a month, paid yearly. Readers only go free on a Fabric capacity of F64 or above. Watch the Pro limits too: 1 GB per semantic model and 8 refreshes a day, against 100 GB and 48 refreshes on Premium Per User. Row level security is defined in the model, but it only filters people with Viewer permission, not workspace Admins, Members or Contributors. For wider options, see our best BI and data visualization tools ranking and our Power BI alternatives page for the reasons teams leave it. To push rows into a dataset, use our Power BI integration with Zapier or our Make integration for Power BI.

Data Studio is Google's free dashboard and reporting tool, sold for a few years as Looker Studio and now back under its first name. You connect a source such as Google Analytics, Google Ads, Sheets or BigQuery, drag charts onto a canvas, and share the report like a Google Doc. Where Metabase asks you to host or pay for a server, Data Studio runs in your browser with a Google account. People move to it when Metabase was mostly used for marketing dashboards, or when nobody wants to maintain an instance any more.

How the price reads against Metabase: Data Studio is available at no charge for creators and report viewers, so a 20 person team pays $0, against $190 a month on Metabase Starter. Data Studio Pro adds team content management, Google Cloud support and administrative controls for $9 per user per project a month; 20 users in one project come to $180 a month. Billing by project means a second project for another department is a second bill, and the price per user varies with the length of the subscription.

Tip: the free tier is self-service, with no support line, so plan for the help forum. Data from tools outside Google often needs a connector or an automation to land in Sheets or BigQuery first, for example with our Make integration for Looker Studio. If your warehouse is not ready yet, our best data warehouse ranking helps you pick one, and our Looker Studio alternatives page lists where teams go when they outgrow it.

Apache Superset is an open source business intelligence web application maintained at the Apache Software Foundation. It has a SQL editor, a no-code chart builder, a semantic layer of datasets and metrics, and dashboards with cross filters. Preset hosts it for you as a managed cloud. Where Metabase is built for business users asking simple questions, Superset is built for analysts: more chart types and more settings. People move to it when Metabase's charts feel limiting, or when the AGPL license worries their legal team.

How the price reads against Metabase: Superset ships under the Apache 2.0 license, which lets you modify and embed it in a commercial product without publishing your code or showing a badge. Self-hosted, it costs only your servers. Preset Starter is $0 for up to 5 users in 1 workspace; Professional is $20 per user a month paid yearly, or $25 monthly, with unlimited users and role-based access control. On yearly billing, a 20 person team pays $4,800 a year on Professional, against $7,510 on Metabase Pro. Embedding on Preset is an add-on: viewer licenses start at $500 a month for 50 viewers. SSO, SCIM and audit logs are Enterprise features on Preset, priced on quote, so a company that needs SSO skips Professional.

Tip: business users find chart building steeper than Metabase's query builder, so keep a few curated datasets for them. If you plan to feed Superset from a Postgres database, our n8n Postgres integration shows how to load data into it.

Grafana is an open source visualization and alerting platform. It queries a data source live, from Postgres and MySQL to Prometheus, Elasticsearch or, through a plugin, BigQuery, and draws the result on dashboards that refresh on their own. Where Metabase is made to answer business questions on tables, Grafana is made to watch numbers move: signups per minute, error rates, orders per hour. People move to it when most of their Metabase dashboards were really live monitors.

How the price reads against Metabase: Grafana OSS is free and self-hosted under the AGPL-3.0 license, the same family of license as Metabase. Grafana Cloud is free for up to 3 active users a month. Cloud Pro has a $19 monthly platform fee that includes 3 active users, then $8 per active user, so a team of 20 pays $155 a month, against $190 on Metabase Starter. Enterprise plugins raise the user price to $55, and Enterprise contracts start at $25,000 a year.

Tip: check the other meters before you scale. Metrics on Grafana Cloud are free up to 10k active series a month, and logs up to 50 GB ingested a month, then pay as you go. The free tier keeps data 14 days; Pro keeps metrics 13 months and logs 30 days. If you pipe events into it, our n8n Grafana integration automates annotations and alerts, and our Grafana alternatives page covers its own limits.

Lightdash is a business intelligence tool built around metrics defined as code. It reads your dbt project, or standalone Lightdash YAML pointed at your warehouse if you do not use dbt, turns the models and metrics you defined there into a catalog, and lets business users pick dimensions and metrics to build charts and dashboards. Charts and dashboards can also be managed as code in Git. Where Metabase keeps its own definitions of segments and metrics inside the tool, Lightdash keeps them in dbt, so the same revenue number appears in every chart. People move to it when two Metabase dashboards show two different revenues.

How the price reads against Metabase: Lightdash does not charge per seat. The open source edition is free to self-host, with code outside its enterprise folder under the MIT license. Cloud Pro starts at $3,000 a month with unlimited users, scheduled deliveries, alerts and a private Slack channel. That is above Metabase Pro for a small team, but the break-even is close: Metabase Pro reaches $3,035 a month at 215 users ($575 plus 205 times $12). Embedding is metered: the first 1,000 chart loads are free, then $0.05 per load.

Tip: a dashboard with 4 embedded charts counts as 4 loads, so 10,000 customer views are 40,000 loads, $1,950 on pay as you go. The Predictable option, $790 a month for 100k loads per Embed Worker, costs less from about 16,800 loads. Single sign-on on Cloud Pro is Google only; Okta, Azure and SAML come with Enterprise. For the pipeline that feeds dbt, see our best ETL and data integration tools.

Holistics is a self-service BI platform with its own modeling language. Analysts define datasets, joins and metrics as code, version them in Git, and business users explore those datasets by dragging fields, without writing SQL. It also builds canvas dashboards that mix charts, filters and text, and schedules data deliveries to several destinations. Where Metabase lets anyone query any table, Holistics makes analysts curate what people can explore. People move to it when Metabase grew into hundreds of questions nobody trusts.

How the price reads against Metabase: Holistics bills a flat plan with 10 users included, then a price per extra user. Entry costs $800 a month paid yearly, or $960 monthly, and caps you at 100 reports; another 100 reports cost $100 a month paid yearly, or $120 monthly. Standard is $1,000 a month paid yearly with unlimited reports, custom charts, Google SSO and your own Git repository. Extra users cost $12.50 a month yearly, or $15 monthly. On yearly billing, a team of 20 on Standard pays $13,500 a year, against $7,510 on Metabase Pro.

Tip: count your reports before choosing Entry, since saved dashboards add up fast. Enterprise SAML SSO, SCIM provisioning and records-based access control are not on Standard: they come with the Security Compliance Suite plan, $2,000 a month paid yearly or $2,400 monthly. If your readers mostly want marketing dashboards, our best marketing reporting tools ranking has lighter options.