Metabase Pricing Teardown
Metabase Pricing Teardown
Metabase is an open-source business intelligence and data visualization tool. This article makes sense of its pricing structure.
This post is a part of series on commercial open source software pricing. See full list of articles here.
What is Metabase?
Metabase is an open-source business intelligence and data visualization tool. I love that it's lightweight yet very powerful and will be enough for most of teams.
It's no-code options are very intuitive and there are templates and snippets to make it even easier to access correct data. At the same time, it allows to run SQL queries and add viewer-controlled variables which makes dashboards interactive.
Of course, sometimes you need full power of Tableau or Python, but Metabase is a great choice when you need a BI tool for a lot of not-so-technical users. At Borzo, ops teams have used it to hack reports for day-to-day tasks (courier payouts, tracking showup rates for high SLA customers etc) using production data.
34.5K stars on Github
Pricing structure
3 plans for both cloud and self-hosting versions – Basic, Business and Enterprise
Annual billing saves 10%
All visualizations and data sources, snippets, models, email/Slack notifications and basic permissions are available on all plans
Editors and viewers cost the same within one plan and user experience is set with permissions
Price of each plan increases with additional seats. Plans differ by feature set and there are no seat limits – i.e. you can have 1000 or 10000 users at Basic plan
Basic Cloud starts at $78/month (annual billing)
5 seats are included, more at $5/seat/month
Business Cloud starts at $450/month (annual billing)
10 seats are included, more at $10/month
You get SSO, embedding, white labelling, row, column, SQL snippet and download permissions, data access audit logs
Enterprise Cloud starts at $15K/year and you get support by named engineer within 1 day, payment by invoice, permissions for embedded apps and single tenant hosting
Basic Self-hosted is under AGPLv3, Business/Enterprise Self-hosted are licensed under Metabase Commercial License and cost the same as cloud versions
Does it make sense to pay?
My take – almost never unless you need granular permissions, SSO or invoicing.
If it's ok to grant admin rights to your analysts/other editors and allow others to go view only – you're set. Additional viewers are as expensive as editors, so price can escalate quickly.
Also, don't see the reason to go cloud unless your DevOps are super swamped. There is no price difference between self-hosted and managed pricing. Hardware won't cost much, but it's a small cost if you're sensitive about data.
This post is a part of series on commercial open source software pricing. See full list of articles here.