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Comment by seveibar | Hacker News Reader

Postgres -> Metabase

I believe this is the best combination of cheap/powerful for early-stage startups. My very non-technical cofounder is able to use metabase's simple GUI interface to create graphs/insights (even joining and aggregating across tables!), and for anything complex I can step in a give a helper SQL query. We have around 10M records we aggregate around for daily insights.

Metabase can also be run as a pseudo-desktop/web application to save additional cash (we don't do this though).

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UX guy from Metabase here. Glad to hear it's working well for you. Happy to answer any questions folks might have.

Wow great to see you in the thread. No questions from me but great job on the latest update.

Many thanks!

Thanks!

-Another Metabase team member

nice job

Great Product. And you guys are great stewards on Github.

Can you please compare it with Superset?

Worlds apart, superset provides powerful visualisation capabilities, but is very difficult to use/setup/maintain (although they just launched as a company [0], so perhaps that will change).

Metabase is a very easy to use data exploration, data vis and reporting tool designed to give insights into data in an easy/self service way for mostly non-technical users.

I've POC'd both, and would recommend Metabase or redash unless you really know what you need out of superset

[0] https://preset.io/blog/2019-10-09-series-a-announcement/

Thank you! Any idea how does it compare with redash then?

Pretty similar feature wise and intended use, I did a direct comparison and went for Metabase because it allows you to schedule reports delivered to email/slack (only allows you to schedule individual queries, not entire dashboards).

I didn't demo redash so can't comment on the actual use comparison.

Sorry not a question, just to say again that your UI rocks. After I came to this post, I stopped everything I was doing to install metabase for my company (and then used it for a project :) ). I have spotted some issues with the installation instructions where do I post them? Issue at Github?

Oh, yeah, thanks for asking! Reasons I had to cancel Metabase deployments.

https://github.com/metabase/metabase/issues/4387 opened this issue on Feb 15, 2017

https://github.com/metabase/metabase/issues/2052 opened this issue on Feb 29, 2016

https://github.com/metabase/metabase/issues/6741 opened this issue on Jan 22, 2018

+1 for Metabase

For our team, using an ELT architecture (as opposed to ETL) [1] for managing our data warehouse has greatly reduced the complexity of our data processes. Instead of creating ETLs for every table we want to load into the data warehouse, we create the minimum necessary setup to copy the table into our data warehouse. Then, we write transforms, which are simply SQL statements, to generate wide-column tables that our non-technical users can use to explore data without worrying about joins or having to learn esoteric naming conventions.

Custom EL Scripts -> Redshift -> Transform Statements -> Redshift -> Metabase supports the data needs of all our departments with no dedicated data team members.

[1] https://www.dataliftoff.com/elt-with-amazon-redshift-an-over...

+1 for metabase. I’ve deployed it at 2 companies. The latest version allows you to compose “questions” you create in the system which is really powerful for organizing layers of data reporting.

Also, their API conforms 100% to Zapier’s polling feed structure, and I managed to build an integration that syncs our customer base to Pipedrive in a few hours. A bit more time and I have it automatically moving deals along in the pipeline as users progress with using the product. That alone was game changing for our customer success team.

Thanks, team Metabase!

Interesting, kinda like this? https://blog.synq.fm/how-we-optimized-our-crm-workflow-using...

P.S. I'm another Metabase + Postgres + Bigquery fan. Thanks Team!

Metabase has been serving our startup well. Not as good as Tableau, but the minimalist approach is really good and SQL is better than Tableau's LOD expressions.

Wow Metabase is free and open source?! Awesome, thank you!

it is licensed under AGPL. For white-label embedding it requires a commercial license: https://www.metabase.com/enterprise/pricing.html Pricing for variant with row-level security is not cheap as you might expect, so if you plan to embed reports in your web app it might be better to consider another alternatives.

Agreed. I helped setup a company on this last year and they're very happy. There's a 'Deploy to Heroku' push button install that was incredibly easy to setup. Great job Metabase folks.: https://www.metabase.com/start/heroku

We've also been using Metabase lately. It doesn't have some of the querying power of a Tableau/Data Studio, but in terms of being able to just click through and "discover" trends in your data, it's really nice. Super quick and easy to get started even for non-technical folks, and best of all it's OSS! Really impressive project.

Looks interesting but I would like to know how is it different than Apache Superset. What is the concept of "Question" here? Is it about some "official terminology" for a "SELECT" query? Any video demo?

I replied to that question here based on my experience: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21523076

Have you ever tried to install/setup Superset? The chances of you completing this task fall somewhere between "Next to impossible" and "Not going to happen".

What's difficult to install it? I have installed both local and Docker Version. The docker one takes more memory though.

You're not installing it when you're using Docker. However that send to be on the only possible way to run it.

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