Metabase

Metabase is an open-source business intelligence tool that lets non-technical people query a company database through a point-and-click question builder, while analysts drop into SQL in the same interface. The problem it solves is the analyst bottleneck. In most companies every number request routes through one or two people who can write SQL, which makes simple questions slow and discourages people from asking them at all. Metabase's answer is a visual query builder good enough that a marketer can answer their own question, backed by dashboards, alerts, and permissions that keep the underlying data safe. Pricing splits into two products. Business intelligence: Starter is $100 per month ($90 per month billed annually, $1,080 per year) with the first 10 users included and $6 per additional user per month ($65 per year), covering 20+ data sources, unlimited questions and dashboards, AI-assisted SQL generation, and 3-day email support. Pro is $575 per month ($517.50 per month billed annually, $6,210 per year) with the first 10 users included and $12 per additional user per month, adding row and column level permissions, SSO, caching controls, usage analytics and auditing, multi-tenant embedded analytics, and white-labelling. Enterprise starts at $20,000 per year with free unlimited users, custom pricing, an air-gapped deployment option, and a 1-day support SLA. Two billing details are easy to miss and change the maths: users of your embedded analytics count as users, not just your internal team; and AI features are billed separately at $3.75 per 1 million tokens if you use Metabase's own AI service rather than bringing your own provider key, with 1 million tokens included. Transforms include 1,000 runs on Starter and Pro, then $0.01 per run. The open-source edition remains free and self-hostable, and for a lot of small teams that is the whole answer - the paid tiers buy permissions, SSO, embedding, and support rather than core functionality. Who it is for: companies of 10 to a few hundred people who have a real database, want everyone to self-serve answers, and do not want to staff a BI team to make that happen. How it compares: Looker is far more powerful and far more expensive, and requires modelling everything in LookML before anyone gets an answer. Tableau and Power BI are stronger for deep visual analysis and weaker for casual self-serve querying. Superset is the closest open-source peer and is more capable but much harder to operate. Retool and Hex serve adjacent needs - internal tools and analyst notebooks - rather than the same one. Choose Metabase when the goal is that non-analysts stop filing requests.