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Metabase

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Power BI

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Metabase vs Power BI: What are the differences?

Metabase and Power BI are popular business intelligence tools that provide data visualization and analysis capabilities. While both tools serve the same purpose, there are key differences that set them apart from each other.

  1. User Interface and Ease of Use: Metabase focuses on simplicity and ease of use, offering a clean and intuitive user interface that allows even non-technical users to create their own visualizations and dashboards. Power BI, on the other hand, offers a more feature-rich and complex interface, catering to users with more advanced data analysis needs.

  2. Data Sources and Connectivity: Metabase supports a limited number of data sources out of the box, and requires additional setup and configuration to connect to more complex data sources. Power BI, on the other hand, offers a wide range of built-in connectors and integrations, allowing users to easily connect to various data sources such as databases, cloud services, and APIs.

  3. Customization and Extensibility: Metabase provides a limited set of customization options, allowing users to modify the appearance and layout of visualizations to a certain extent. Power BI, on the other hand, offers a wide range of customization options and allows users to create custom visuals using JavaScript-based programming.

  4. Collaboration and Sharing: Metabase provides basic collaboration and sharing features, allowing users to share dashboards and visualizations with others through a shareable link. Power BI, on the other hand, offers more advanced collaboration features, such as real-time collaboration and the ability to publish dashboards to the Power BI service for easy sharing and access.

  5. Advanced Analytics and Machine Learning: Power BI offers advanced analytics capabilities, including the ability to create complex calculations, perform statistical analysis, and integrate machine learning models into visualizations. Metabase, on the other hand, focuses more on basic data exploration and visualization, with limited support for advanced analytics.

  6. Pricing and Licensing: Metabase is an open-source tool and is free to use, making it an attractive option for small businesses and individuals. Power BI, on the other hand, offers both free and paid plans, with additional features and capabilities available in the paid versions.

In summary, Metabase is a user-friendly and cost-effective option for basic data analysis and visualization, while Power BI offers more advanced features and capabilities, making it suitable for users with more complex data analysis needs.

Decisions about Metabase and Power BI
Vojtech Kopal
Head of Data at Mews Systems · | 3 upvotes · 297.9K views

Power BI is really easy to start with. If you have just several Excel sheets or CSV files, or you build your first automated pipeline, it is actually quite intuitive to build your first reports.

And as we have kept growing, all the additional features and tools were just there within the Azure platform and/or Office 365.

Since we started building Mews, we have already passed several milestones in becoming start up, later also a scale up company and now getting ready to grow even further, and during all these phases Power BI was just the right tool for us.

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Pros of Metabase
Pros of Power BI
  • 62
    Database visualisation
  • 45
    Open Source
  • 41
    Easy setup
  • 36
    Dashboard out of the box
  • 23
    Free
  • 14
    Simple
  • 9
    Support for many dbs
  • 7
    Easy embedding
  • 6
    Easy
  • 6
    It's good
  • 5
    AGPL : wont help with adoption but depends on your goal
  • 5
    BI doesn't get easier than that
  • 4
    Google analytics integration
  • 4
    Multiple integrations
  • 4
    Easy set up
  • 17
    Cross-filtering
  • 2
    Powerful Calculation Engine
  • 2
    Access from anywhere
  • 2
    Intuitive and complete internal ETL
  • 2
    Database visualisation
  • 1
    Azure Based Service

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Cons of Metabase
Cons of Power BI
  • 7
    Harder to setup than similar tools
    Be the first to leave a con

    Sign up to add or upvote consMake informed product decisions

    - No public GitHub repository available -

    What is Metabase?

    It is an easy way to generate charts and dashboards, ask simple ad hoc queries without using SQL, and see detailed information about rows in your Database. You can set it up in under 5 minutes, and then give yourself and others a place to ask simple questions and understand the data your application is generating.

    What is Power BI?

    It aims to provide interactive visualizations and business intelligence capabilities with an interface simple enough for end users to create their own reports and dashboards.

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    What are some alternatives to Metabase and Power BI?
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    Superset's main goal is to make it easy to slice, dice and visualize data. It empowers users to perform analytics at the speed of thought.
    Looker
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    Redash
    Redash helps you make sense of your data. Connect and query your data sources, build dashboards to visualize data and share them with your company.
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