What is Metabase?
Metabase is an open-source business intelligence tool headquartered in San Francisco, positioned as a simpler alternative to Tableau or Looker. The open-source edition is free to self-host under the AGPLv3 license; paid Cloud and Enterprise tiers add SSO, auditing, and managed hosting. It connects to 50+ data sources and combines a no-code query builder with a native SQL editor.
Read the full overview
Sources checked 27 September 2026: official website, documentation, GitHub repository, pricing page.
MetabaseAnalytics & BIOpen-source BI for dashboards, ad hoc queries and embedding
Key capabilities
- Query builder & SQL editor: No-code exploration plus a native SQL mode for analysts.
- Dashboards & alerts: Interactive dashboards with scheduled email/Slack alerts.
- 50+ connectors: Postgres, Snowflake, BigQuery, MySQL, Google Sheets and more.
Where Metabase fits
Business intelligence dashboards and embedded analytics are the primary use cases.
Positioning and limitations
Shortlist Metabase when you want self-serve BI without heavy licensing costs and your users are comfortable with a visual query builder or basic SQL. For governance-heavy enterprises, compare against Looker or Tableau's semantic-layer and access-control depth.
Confirm your warehouse is on the connector list and compare self-hosted operating cost against Cloud/Enterprise per-user pricing before rolling out broadly.
“Open-source BI for dashboards, ad hoc queries and embedding”
Technical details
- Access
- Self-hosted
- Source model
- Open source
- License
- Verify license
- Founded
- 2014
- Headquarters
- San Francisco, USA
- Pricing model
- Freemium
- Pricing details
- Software and service terms ↗
- API
- Not specified
- API documentation
- Read API documentation ↗
- Website
- www.metabase.com ↗
- GitHub
- Source repository ↗
What to verify
Start from the users, systems and operating responsibilities the tool needs to support.
- Confirm current features, licensing and support terms.
- Validate deployment, data location and access control.
- Test integrations, exports and recovery workflows.
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