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Comment by hitekker | Hacker News Reader

I evaluated on-premise Redash as an alternative for engineers and analysts who don't want to learn tableau. It's harder to setup than Metabase but more intuitive to use (for someone with SQL expertise).

However, their feature-set was fairly lacking and the company as a whole seemed directionless.

It's a tough space to be in, and I'm disappointed they couldn't find their footing.

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OTOH, I've evaluated Metabase a number of times and never manage to get more than 10 minutes in before running into some staggering flaw that convinces me that I can't put this in front of other people in the business and expect them to use it. I ended up deploying Redash instead - it is unquestionably a much less ambitious project, but it mostly achieves its aims.

Not excited about the “less ambitious project”, but still better than being something that can’t be put in front of people. Glad you found Redash useful. :-)

@arikfr I've learned a lot from redash. Firstly, after knowing redash, I decided to go open-source with my service. I learned a lot from reading redash source-code/repository. Your project is amazing and was inspiration for me! Thank you!

Metabase's indexing really killed our database (SQL Server with dozens of tables, in the low terrabytes) performance. Obviously it's best practice to put that data in either a read replica or in another source, but at the time it wasn't worth the effort for us.

What did you think of Apache Superset?

We (dbhub.io) were looking at the existing Open Source BI tool front ends, trying to see if there are good chart widget sets and or query text box interfaces we could integrate.

Superset was terrible, whereas Metabase seemed pretty easy to use. Ended up just integrating Plotly.js charts though, like Redash, as they seemed more straightfoward. Redash uses them to good effect too. :)

What do you mean by "they couldn't find their footing"?

(I'm Redash founder)

Congrats on the exit btw. Seems like a good fit with Databricks!

It's probably from the perspective that (mostly) any time a smaller player is absorbed into an established one, the smaller player is assumed to not be doing so well.

We installed redash last year. I actually want to compare redash, metabase, & superset.

But installing redash in ec2 is so simple that we just straight use it and forget the alternatives.

As someone looking at Redash to replace Metabase at work, what is it lacking? I’m considering moving to Redash mainly to be able to do cross-DB joins.

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