Metabase is the easy-to-use, open source Business Intelligence tool that lets everyone work with data, with or without SQL. Make self-service analytics finally happen in your org, or embed Metabase in your app for customer-facing analytics.
Hey hey PH community We kicked off a little Made with Metabase contest on Reddit and would love to see what you ve been building.
If you've shipped something with Metabase (dashboards, internal tools, data stack, or scrappy MVPs), this is a nice excuse to turn that work into a limited-edition Metabase mechanical keyboard Join in here: https://metaba.se/made-with-meta...
highlight effortless exploration, fast onboarding, and clear, decision‑driving insights. Users like its open‑source flexibility, strong self‑serve analytics, and smooth embedding. Common asks: better exports (email/PDF), native integrations (e.g., Mixpanel), KPI glossary features, and more product‑manager‑oriented docs. Overall, a dependable, lightweight BI staple that scales from solo use to teams, with room for polish in reporting workflows.
I like Metabase, we've used it in the company I worked at for a while, and as a BI analyst I get most of my day-to-day tasks done there. As a non-technical user it saves lots of time as I don't rely on devs for SQL and tasks that would otherwise take much time (e.g. visualization), are done quicker. It is also great for cross-departmental communication.
What needs improvement
data visualization (1)
Despite its growth and (I would assume) huge budgets going into understanding what their customers really want, the exporting dashboards and their customization elements are very hard to navigate. What I mean is that, just like everything else is optimized for simplicity, so should data visualization be as well. Perhaps a tool that you can have a look at that does a great job and is similar to Metabase is TalkBI. You simply click on one button and poof - report is made. Other than that, perhaps it would be possible to review the SQL generated by Metabase so we can help improve its effectiveness for more complex queries.
Did non-technical users succeed without writing SQL?
yes they did, initially we had the dev review functions to make sure everything works well, but for people in Marketing, Product, Sales, etc. he has stopped doing it completelly.
How smooth was embedding analytics into your application?
it was very good
Is scheduling and email/PDF delivery reliable and flexible?
same as you would expect from any other tool in this caliber.
Metabase is an open-source browser-based BI software that works with many databases including mySQL Mariadb etc. It can be self-hosted so I installed it on-premise for my small company.
Its features are relatively simple, but it is easy for a non proficient user to write requests in the tables even without knowledge of SQL or programming language. It is also easy to share and assign data with the team.
The weak point of the software is when you export your data, currently emailing doesn’t work well and PDF has limitations. (V0.48).
But overall great and useful software for data analysis.
Metabase has become indispensable to our product workflow at Slytrunk. It is powerful, flexible and reliable, and I would recommend it to any founder without the tens of thousands to spend on Periscope or Domo.
It requires some setup, and there is a learning curve, but it's IMO a great investment of time.
One thing that could be improved is more product manager focused documentation with cookbooks for common queries, such as those commonly rolled out for Google Analytics (BigQuery).