Metabase

Business intelligence dashboards and SQL analytics, free and unlimited self-hosted, or from $100/month for 5 cloud seats.

Visit Metabase

About

In practice. What you can do with Metabase.

Metabase builds dashboards and reports from company data with a visual query builder for non-SQL users and a native SQL editor for advanced ones, plus scheduled email/Slack reports and row/table-level permissions.

The open-source edition is entirely free with unlimited users and dashboards if you self-host it. The cloud Starter plan costs $100/month for the first 5 users, then $6/user/month, with usage add-ons for AI, transforms and storage stacking on top. It suits a small ops team that wants shared dashboards without per-seat BI pricing.

Practical uses

Weekly reportingBuild a dashboard with the visual query builder and schedule it to email the team every Monday.
Self-hosted analyticsRun the free open-source edition on your own server to give the whole team unlimited dashboards at no license cost.

Features & use cases

Database

Dashboards

Data visualisation

Reporting

For. What works in its favour.

Self-hosted open-source edition is fully free with no user or dashboard limit.
Covers both a visual query builder for non-SQL users and a native SQL editor for advanced ones.

Pays off from

2 h 15saved a month

Metabase costs $90/month. If your hour is worth $40, those 2 h 15 cover it.

Your hour is worth$40/h

Against. What to plan for.

Web-based only, no desktop or mobile app.
Cloud usage add-ons for AI, transforms and storage stack on top of the seat price.

Too expensive if

You use it less than once a month
A simple free version or a tool already in your stack would do

Pricing. What does Metabase cost ?

Free

Permanent free plan

Self-hosted only
Unlimited users
Dashboards and data sources

Starter

ToolTrim reference price

$90/mo

Billed annually · $100/mo billed monthly. Per user, 5 minimum.

First 5 users included
Then $6/month per extra user ($65/year)
3-day email/Slack support

Pro

$517.50/mo

Billed annually · $575/mo billed monthly. Per user, 10 minimum.

First 10 users included
Then $12/month per extra user
Adds row/column permissions, SSO, caching, white-label

Enterprise

Custom quote. Per user.

Starts around $20,000/year
Dedicated success engineer
1-day support SLA
Air-gap deployment

Checked on September 25, 2026Official pricing

Alternatives. What could replace Metabase?

Looker Studio3.6/5 · Very goodFree, then from €7.73/moA free, no-code dashboard and reporting builder connected to Google Analytics, Sheets and BigQuery, with a paid team tier.

Grafana3.9/5 · Very goodFreeDashboards, logs, metrics, and alerting for technical stacks.

Hex3.4/5 · GoodFrom €30.91/moHex is a collaborative notebook tool for SQL and Python analysis that publishes directly into interactive apps and dashboards.

Our verdict. What to know about Metabase.

How the score breaks down

Added value

The self-hosted open-source edition is fully free with unlimited users, dashboards and data sources, a real cost advantage over per-seat BI tools.

Simplicity

The visual query builder with joins and aggregations lets non-SQL users produce a usable chart without writing code.

Fit for purpose

Delivers interactive dashboards, a native SQL editor and scheduled email/Slack reports as advertised.

Performance

Row/table/dashboard permissions, audit trails and SOC 2 compliance cover team-level BI, but the visual builder hits limits on highly complex queries where SQL is still needed.

Reversibility

Neutral score: export formats and data portability out of Metabase are not covered by the collected sources.

Decided? Visit Metabase or compare alternatives

AI. What it changes for Metabase.

AI augments this tool

Go further with AI

Metabase added an AI assistant to generate SQL queries from natural-language questions, but remains an open-source BI tool connected to real company data.

Can AI replace it?

Replace Metabase with an AI? No: visualizing and querying real company data connected to multiple sources remains a reporting infrastructure need. AI helps write the query, it doesn't replace the data connection. Verdict: AI augments data access, connected reporting remains the product.