Alternatives
Best Metabase alternatives
Metabase is free under AGPL v3 for unlimited users if you self-host, and that is a genuine advantage. The costs are indirect. Someone deploys it, upgrades it and keeps it available. AI sits on the paid tiers, and the hosted Starter is $90 a month plus $6 per user. Most people looking elsewhere are either tired of running it or have hit what a question builder will do. Here are eight alternatives, grouped by the job they suit.
How to read this
Flitch publishes this page and is one of the tools on it. Prices are the vendors’ own published figures, and every entry says what the tool costs you as well as what it is good at.
Prices checked
At a glance
| Tool | Best for | Entry price |
|---|---|---|
| Apache Superset | Engineering teams who want to run their own BI layer. | Free, self-hosted |
| Looker Studio | Reporting on Google Ads, Analytics and Sheets with no budget. | Free |
| Flitch | Teams who want dashboards, reports, apps and workflows built from a description. | Free tier, then $20/month |
| Hex | Data teams who work in notebooks. | Free Community tier, then $36/editor/month |
| Sigma | Finance and operations people who work in spreadsheets. | No public pricing |
| Power BI | Companies already running Microsoft 365, Azure or Fabric. | Free account, then $14/user/month paid yearly |
| Looker | Teams who want every metric defined once and governed. | No public pricing |
| Basedash | Teams buying AI dashboards at enterprise scale. | $1,000/month floor, no smaller tier |
Open source and developer-first
Apache Superset
Free, self-hosted- Best for.
- Engineering teams who want to run their own BI layer.
- Where it wins.
- Free, and running at scale inside large companies.
- What it costs you.
- Standing it up and keeping it current is a real job, and it assumes SQL.
Hex
Free Community tier, then $36/editor/month- Best for.
- Data teams who work in notebooks.
- Where it wins.
- Python, SQL and no-code cells in one document.
- What it costs you.
- $36 per editor per month after the free tier, and it is built for analysts rather than for the people reading the output.
Enterprise BI
Looker Studio
Free- Best for.
- Reporting on Google Ads, Analytics and Sheets with no budget.
- Where it wins.
- Free, with Google sources connected in a couple of clicks.
- What it costs you.
- Thin modelling, and it slows badly once the data is large or needs joining.
Power BI
Free account, then $14/user/month paid yearly- Best for.
- Companies already running Microsoft 365, Azure or Fabric.
- Where it wins.
- $14 per user per month paid yearly, the cheapest enterprise BI seat there is.
- What it costs you.
- Copilot is not in that price. It needs a Fabric capacity from $262.80 a month on top of seats, and Desktop is Windows only.
Looker
No public pricing- Best for.
- Teams who want every metric defined once and governed.
- Where it wins.
- LookML puts definitions in version control, so a number means the same thing in every report.
- What it costs you.
- No public pricing, and LookML is an engineering job to write and then keep current.
Built around AI
Flitch
Free tier, then $20/month- Best for.
- Teams who want dashboards, reports, apps and workflows built from a description.
- Where it wins.
- AI on every plan including the free one, and every chart shows the dataset, columns and calculation behind it.
- What it costs you.
- SCIM and running it in your own cloud need an Enterprise agreement, and it does not build an app with its own auth and payments.
Basedash
$1,000/month floor, no smaller tier- Best for.
- Teams buying AI dashboards at enterprise scale.
- Where it wins.
- SSO, SCIM and audit logs on the lowest tier, and it self-hosts.
- What it costs you.
- $1,000 a month floor, with nothing below it.
Spreadsheet-style
Sigma
No public pricing- Best for.
- Finance and operations people who work in spreadsheets.
- Where it wins.
- A spreadsheet over the warehouse, and it writes back.
- What it costs you.
- No public pricing, and you need a cloud warehouse before you start.
When to stay with Metabase
- You have an engineer who already runs it and the upkeep is not noticed.
- Your team works in SQL and the question builder covers the rest.
- Unlimited users at zero licence cost is the number that decides it.
- You need the data to stay on your own infrastructure with no exceptions.
Questions
What is the best Metabase alternative that is also free?
Apache Superset, which is free and self-hosted on the same terms, so you trade one upkeep burden for another. Looker Studio is free and hosted, but only comfortable on Google sources.
Is there an alternative with nothing to run?
Flitch has a free tier with no infrastructure, at 40 credits a month with 100 dashboards and 10 integrations. The choice is not free against paid, it is free-if-you-operate-it against free-with-nothing-to-run.
Which alternatives do more than dashboards?
Flitch builds reports, data-entry apps and scheduled workflows alongside dashboards. Sigma writes back to the warehouse. Hex produces notebooks you can publish. Metabase stays a question-and-dashboard tool.
Does AGPL v3 affect my business?
Only if you modify Metabase and give users of that deployment access. Then you owe them the source. Running it unmodified for your own team carries no obligation, which covers most people.
What does Metabase charge once I stop self-hosting?
Starter is $90 a month plus $6 per user, with five users included. AI is charged separately. At that point you are comparing hosted prices, and the free-software argument no longer applies.