📊 Metabase

Metabase is your instant on-ramp to business intelligence. Easy data exploration, analysis and visualization from many data sources for small groups all the way up to large organizations.

AwesomeFOSS Team

Feb 16, 2023 • 2 min read

Metabase (code) is a high quality business intelligence tool that you can self host for free.

Metabase promotional screenshot (source: https://www.metabase.com/product/)

Metabase is chock-full of features, supports a large array of data sources, from local machine to fully "web scale" and beyond. It's an easy way to get any group or organization up to speed on basic to intermediate business intelligence.

The license for Metabase might seem a bit unwelcoming, but it is certainly Free Software (in addition to being open source): it's mostly AGPLv3 with a slight splash of restrictions for embedding Metabase (essentially, you cannot remove any o the branding), and of course, the enterprise features that are under a separate license.

Getting started with Metabase

Metabase has a great page on getting started:

Unlike most other F/OSS projects which might sometimes be lacking in user experience, Metabase has quite a considered flow, and is generally easy to get through.

As for running metabase, there's an official docker image that you can use which is easy to start.

docker run -d -p 3000:3000 --name metabase metabase/metabase

Of course, the above is too simple – you're going to need some persistent storage if you want to save any of your data! For a more production-ready setup, check out the docker-compose.yml included in the repo: