Charts and dashboards straight from the database
Metabase is an open source business intelligence tool: you point it at a database and turn its tables into charts and dashboards. The server is written in Clojure and runs on the JVM; the frontend is TypeScript. Each query, which Metabase calls a "question", is built either in a visual editor that filters, summarizes and joins tables without any SQL, or in a SQL editor for anything more involved.
The visual editor is what sets Metabase apart from Redash, where everything starts from a hand-written SQL query. Licensing sets it apart from Apache Superset as well: Superset and Redash ship under permissive licenses with no commercial edition in their repositories, while the Metabase repository carries one.
The comparison of open source BI tools sets this free-versus-paid split against the licensing of the other tools.
Joins and filters without writing SQL
- Visual editor: filters, aggregations and joins are point-and-click. "View SQL" shows the native query Metabase will send, and clicking a value on a chart opens a menu to dig into the result.
- Alerts and subscriptions: an alert fires when a question returns a result or a time series crosses its goal line. Dashboards can go out on a schedule by email, to Slack or to a webhook.
- Data sources: the documentation lists eighteen official drivers, PostgreSQL, BigQuery, Snowflake, ClickHouse and MongoDB among them, plus community drivers.
- AI assistant: Metabot writes SQL, builds a chart from a plain-language question and fixes broken queries. Self-hosted, it needs an API key from a provider such as Anthropic, OpenAI or Mistral.
- Guest embedding: charts and dashboards drop into another application, and the people viewing them need no Metabase account.
Two licenses, with SSO and full embedding in paid tiers
One repository, two licenses. Code outside the top-level enterprise directory is AGPL-3.0; code inside it falls under the Metabase Commercial License. Every release ships as two Docker images: metabase/metabase, the open source edition, versioned 0.x, and metabase/metabase-enterprise, versioned 1.x. The enterprise build only unlocks its features with a license token. Without a valid one, it runs as the open source edition.
What Pro and Enterprise keep to themselves. SAML, JWT and OIDC sign-in, two-factor authentication, row- and column-level security, exporting and importing content between instances, Git sync and AI usage limits. The open source edition allows unlimited users, Google sign-in and LDAP, minus the LDAP group membership filter and user attribute sync. It also keeps no record of who viewed what.
Full embedding is a paid feature. Guest embeds on the open source edition carry a "Powered by Metabase" banner and leave out the visual editor and the drill-through menu. Removing the banner, embedding the whole application or applying the signed-in user's permissions takes Pro or Enterprise. Pro costs $575 a month with ten users included, then $12 per user; Enterprise starts at $20,000 a year (pricing page read on October 7, 2026). Both can be self-hosted or run on Metabase Cloud.
SQL questions explore less. Converting a visual-editor question to SQL is one-way, and a question written in SQL only gets a limited drill-through menu.
What you need to run it. A Docker image, or a JAR that requires Java 25. Out of the box, Metabase keeps its own data in a local H2 database, which the documentation says to avoid in production: it recommends PostgreSQL and also supports MySQL 8.4 or MariaDB 10.6. By default the JVM claims about a quarter of the machine's RAM. Support for the open source edition is the community forum, and Metabase Cloud only accepts official drivers, so a community driver means self-hosting.
Six major versions between January and July 2026. Version 58.1 shipped on January 6 and 63.1 on July 21; 64.0 has been in beta since September 24. Fixes land on several branches at once: on September 1, six releases went out, from 58 to 63. The latest stable release, 0.63.19, is dated October 1, 2026.