What is Rill?
Rill is a business intelligence tool that defines data models, metrics, dashboards, and access policies in code. Its semantic layer describes dimensions, measures, and time grains in YAML and generates SQL against an OLAP engine at query time. It supports ClickHouse and DuckDB, alongside connections to external engines.
Rill Developer provides local data connections, SQL transformations, column profiling, incremental ingestion, and dashboard previews. Projects can be deployed to Rill Cloud through the command line or a connected Git repository. Cloud capabilities include interactive dashboards, natural-language metric queries, an MCP server, REST access to metrics, embedded dashboards, and alerts.
Rill Developer connects to S3, GCS, databases and more than 20 sources, and includes managed ClickHouse or DuckDB or connects to an external engine such as ClickHouse Cloud, Druid, Pinot or MotherDuck. The quick start installs the CLI with a curl script and creates a project with rill start, and rill init can scaffold agent instructions for Claude.
Rill screenshots
Explore the interface. Open a screenshot to view it at full size.
Source: official Rill project page.
Key capabilities
- Data preparation Connect data sources, transform and join data with SQL, inspect column distributions, and ingest new data incrementally.
- Semantic layer Define dimensions, measures, and time grains in YAML to generate queries against an OLAP engine.
- Dashboard development Build and preview dashboards locally, then deploy versioned projects to Rill Cloud.
- Access policies Define per-user and per-group row access policies in code.
- Agent access Let coding agents author project files and connect AI agents to metrics through an MCP server.
- Application delivery Embed dashboards, expose metrics through REST APIs, and configure threshold alerts and reports.
Where Rill fits
Rill fits analytics workflows where data teams maintain metrics and dashboards alongside code. The supplied examples cover advertising campaign analysis, cloud cost monitoring enriched with customer data, and contributor activity. Its embedding and API capabilities also support analytics within an existing product.
Before deployment, teams should verify source connectivity, OLAP engine suitability, ingestion requirements, and row access policies. They should also distinguish local development capabilities from Rill Cloud features and confirm hosting requirements and commercial terms for their intended deployment.
Install
curl https://rill.sh | shReviews of Rill
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Alternatives to Rill
AlteryxAlteryx Designer builds visual data preparation and analysis workflows; Alteryx One also has cloud modules with different requirements.
Apache SupersetApache Superset is an Apache Software Foundation project for data exploration and visualization. It offers a no-code chart builder, the SQL Lab editor, dashboards, a lightweight semantic layer, role-based security, a REST API and an MCP server, for SQL databases.AZApache ZeppelinApache Zeppelin is an Apache 2.0 web notebook for interactive data analysis, with 20+ interpreters, built-in charts, dynamic forms and cron scheduling.