The best Metabase alternatives, compared honestly
Start with the fact that reframes this search: Metabase Open Source is AGPL licensed and free for unlimited users, with no row, dashboard or seat cap. Nobody is fleeing the query builder. What teams run into is a governance wall with a price on it. Row- and column-level permissions, SAML, OIDC, SCIM, audit logs and serialization are all paid features, and because the $100 Starter plan exists only on Metabase Cloud, a self-hosted install has exactly one rung above free: Pro at $575 per month, or $6,210 per year billed yearly. This page compares six alternatives on that single axis: what the free self-hosted edition withholds, and what the first paid rung actually costs.
Pick by what Metabase is withholding from you:
- Row-level security and SSO, for free → Apache Superset: Apache-2.0, RLS filters and Flask-AppBuilder auth are configuration, not a plan.
- Stop counting seats → Lightdash: $3,000 per month flat for unlimited users, but dbt is mandatory.
- Reports in git, no seat meter → Evidence (MIT) or Redash (BSD-2-Clause), both free to self-host with nothing held back.
- If your only problem is the invoice: free Metabase has no user cap, so check whether you need governance or just hosting before you migrate anything.
Why teams look elsewhere
What pushes teams off Metabase
Metabase did not get worse at its core job, and its free edition did not shrink. Every pattern below is about the boundary between the free edition and the first paid one, and each figure comes from Metabase's own pricing page or docs, read in August 2026.
The governance wall
Row- and column-level permissions, SAML, JWT, OIDC and SCIM, usage analytics and auditing, serialization and white labeling are Pro and Enterprise features per Metabase's own docs. Google Sign-in and LDAP do work on the free edition, so the accurate complaint is that it is SAML-less, not SSO-less.
$0 to $575, with no step in between
The $100 per month Starter plan is Metabase Cloud only: in the pricing page markup its card renders only when the deployment toggle is set to Cloud. Self-host and the ladder reads free, then Pro at $575 per month ($517.50 per month billed yearly, $6,210 per year). There is no middle rung to grow into.
The real entry rate is $57.50 per user
Pro's $575 bundles the first 10 users, and $12 per user per month applies from the 11th user onward. Listicles quote the $12. A ten-person team actually pays $57.50 per user per month. Checked explicitly: no plan states a seat minimum, so the floor is a bundled platform fee rather than a minimum headcount.
Your customers are billable seats
Printed beside every plan: "Both your internal team developing analytics and users of your embeds accessed through your product count as users." The FAQ is blunter still: everyone who signs in, directly or via SSO, is a billable user. Customer-facing embedded analytics therefore scales the licence bill with your customer base.
Enterprise buys support, not features
Metabase's own FAQ answers "What's the difference between Pro and Enterprise? Feature wise: zero." Enterprise adds a dedicated success engineer, a 1-day SLA and air gap, and starts at $20,000 per year. Useful honesty, and a reason not to assume the next tier unlocks anything.
New usage meters on top
Beyond seats: the Metabase AI service is $3.75 per 1M tokens if you do not bring your own provider key, transforms include 1,000 runs then cost $0.01 per run ($0.02 for advanced transforms on Cloud), and Cloud Storage starts at $2 per 1M rows. Self-hosting makes transforms unlimited, because they run on your hardware.
The shortlist
6 Metabase alternatives worth evaluating
Metabase is two products in one: a point-and-click question builder for everybody, and a governed reporting platform for the data team. Most alternatives replace only one half. This ranking weights the half that costs money, so a permissive licence and a free self-host with governance included count heavily, and every pick carries one real weakness.
The defensible #1 for one precise reason: the two things Metabase puts behind $575 per month are free here. Row-level security filters are a documented core feature with their own REST API, and authentication is delegated to Flask-AppBuilder, so OAuth, OIDC and LDAP logins are configuration rather than a plan. Licensed Apache-2.0 as an Apache Software Foundation top-level project, the strongest governance on this page, with 74.3k GitHub stars and release 6.1.0 on 2026-05-13. There is no first-party paid tier at all. Weakness: it is heavier to run, because async queries, caching and alerts want Redis plus Celery, and its self-service question builder is less approachable for non-SQL users than Metabase's. Hosted route if you want one: Preset is free to 5 users, then $20 per user per month billed annually.
The only tool here that removes the seat meter as a design decision: Cloud Pro is $3,000 per month, flat, for unlimited users, and the pricing page headline says as much. Licensed MIT with a carve-out for everything under packages/backend/src/ee, and it is the most active project on this page, with release 1.199.0 shipped on 2026-08-19. Metrics live in your dbt project, so definitions are reviewed in pull requests rather than re-typed in a dashboard. Weakness: dbt is mandatory, stated plainly in their own FAQ, and the flat fee cuts both ways, because $3,000 per month is five times Metabase Pro for a ten-person team. Okta, Azure and custom SSO plus SCIM 2.0 sit on Enterprise, which has no published price.
Ranked third on licence purity: BSD-2-Clause, and the only project here with no enterprise directory at all, so there is no paid edition that could withhold a feature. SQL editor, dashboards, alerts and 28.7k stars. The maintenance story deserves precision rather than the usual verdict: releases went v10.1.0 in November 2021, then nothing until v25.1.0 in January 2025, followed by v25.8.0 and v26.3.0 on 2026-03-02, with commits landing as recently as 2026-08-18. Alive and shipping again, but slowly. Weakness: it is SQL-first, so non-technical users cannot build their own questions, there is no semantic layer, and there is no hosted option, since redash.io/pricing now redirects to the homepage.
Apache-2.0, release v0.88.6 on 2026-08-03, and a genuinely different feel: dashboards are defined as code and served by an embedded DuckDB engine, so slicing a large table is instant rather than a round trip to the warehouse. Free and complete when you run it locally or self-hosted. Weakness: Rill Cloud runs two meters at once, $20 per seat per month on Starter plus $0.15 per compute-unit-hour billed separately, and their own calculator spells out what that means: 2 compute units for 720 hours is $216 per month before a single seat. The metrics-layer-first model also is not the tool for letting anyone wander through a schema asking ad-hoc questions.
Reports are markdown files with SQL blocks that build into a static site, which makes review, diffing and rollback ordinary git operations, and makes self-hosting free of any seat meter. Licensed MIT with no carve-out, 6.9k stars. Evidence Cloud is $15 per user per month on Team and $25 per user per month on Pro, which is where SSO sits. Weakness: there is no point-and-click authoring at all, so business users consume reports rather than build them, which is the opposite of why many teams picked Metabase. Second caveat: commits continue, but the core npm package has not had a release since 40.1.8 on 2026-02-06.
Google's dashboard tool, now branded Data Studio again on its own product page rather than Looker Studio, is free of charge for creators and report viewers, which no other hosted option here matches. The paid rung is narrow and cheap: Data Studio Pro at $9 per user per project per month, buying Google Cloud support, admin controls and customer-managed encryption keys. Weakness: it is proprietary, cannot be self-hosted, has the weakest warehouse governance of the six, and its comfort zone is the Google stack of BigQuery, Ads and Analytics rather than an arbitrary Postgres. Include it in an evaluation, but do not expect it to replace a governed internal BI platform.
Deliberately left off: Grafana is observability and time-series first, so ranking it as a BI replacement would be dishonest even though its free edition is uncapped. Tableau, Power BI and Looker (Google Cloud core) are quote-only enterprise suites; Looker core lists "Call sales" for every edition, which is the opposite direction from a team trying to escape a $575 per month rung.
Side by side
Metabase alternatives compared
Prices as of August 2026, read from each vendor's own pricing page in USD as shown to a US visitor. The column that decides these evaluations is withheld from the free self-host, because that is the only reason a team on a free, uncapped tool starts shopping. Metabase's own rows are the baseline, split into the free edition and the plans people actually pay for.
| Tool | Withheld from the free self-host | First paid rung | Bills by | Licence | Last release |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Metabase OSS | RLS/sandboxing, SAML, OIDC, SCIM, audit logs, serialization, white label | $575/mo Pro (self-hosted; Starter is Cloud only) | Free, unlimited users | AGPL outside enterprise/ |
v0.63.2, 2026-07-29 |
| Metabase Cloud | n/a | $100/mo Starter, 5 users, then $6/user/mo | Anyone who signs in, embed users included | Commercial licence | Managed service |
| Apache Superset | ✓ nothing: RLS and OAuth/LDAP included | None first-party; Preset $20/user/mo billed annually | Nothing when self-hosted | Apache-2.0 (ASF top-level) | 6.1.0, 2026-05-13 |
| Lightdash | Okta/Azure SSO, SAML, SCIM 2.0, custom roles | $3,000/mo Cloud Pro, unlimited users | Nothing per seat, flat platform fee | MIT, ee/ carve-out |
1.199.0, 2026-08-19 |
| Redash | ✓ nothing: no paid edition exists | No published price, no hosted plan | Nothing | BSD-2-Clause | v26.3.0, 2026-03-02 |
| Rill | Managed hosting, alerts at scale, embedding quota | $20/seat/mo plus $0.15 per compute-unit-hour | Seats and compute hours, two meters | Apache-2.0 | v0.88.6, 2026-08-03 |
| Evidence | SSO, page-level access control, embedding | $15/user/mo Team, $25/user/mo Pro | Users on Cloud, nothing self-hosted | MIT | 40.1.8, 2026-02-06 |
| Data Studio | No self-host at all | $9 per user per project per month (Pro) | Users per project on Pro; free tier is free | Proprietary | Managed service |
Numbers that do not fit in cells: Metabase Pro is $575 per month including the first 10 users, then $12 per user per month, or $517.50 per month billed yearly ($6,210 per year); Starter is $100 per month including 5 users, then $6 per user per month, or $90 per month billed yearly ($1,080 per year); Enterprise starts at $20,000 per year and is feature-identical to Pro. No Metabase plan states a seat minimum. Preset Starter is free forever to 5 users and one workspace, Professional is $20 per user per month billed annually or $25 billed monthly, and SSO, SCIM and audit logs are Enterprise-only there. Lightdash charges $490 per month for a HIPAA BAA and prices embedding at $0.05 per load after the first 1,000, or $790 per month per Embed Worker for 100k loads. Rill charges $0.20 per compute-unit-hour on Growth and includes a $250 usage credit on every plan. Pricing and limits change often; check each vendor for current terms. Compiled August 2026.
Official pages: Metabase pricing · Metabase paid features · Apache Superset · Preset · Lightdash · Redash · Rill · Evidence · Data Studio
A fair call
When Metabase is still the right choice
Migrating BI is a rebuild, not an import, because every tool here stores questions and dashboards in its own schema. Metabase's export tool, serialization, is itself a paid feature, so the portable asset is your SQL. That cost is high enough that most readers should stay, and only some should move.
Metabase is still right if…
- Non-technical colleagues build their own questions. The free edition's click-to-explore builder is the most approachable in this set, and none of the code-first alternatives replace it.
- You need no row-level sandboxing and no SAML. Then free Metabase is uncapped on users, questions, dashboards and data sources, and no alternative here is cheaper than free.
- Your usage is heavy but your headcount is small. Per-seat billing is an advantage in that shape, because Metabase meters neither queries, dashboards nor data sources.
- You want managed hosting for five people and can live without governance: Cloud Starter at $100 per month undercuts every hosted alternative here except Preset's free tier and Data Studio, though Metabase's own pricing page lists "Row and column level permissions" and "SSO" as Pro additions on top of Starter.
Look elsewhere if…
- You need row-level security or SAML on a self-hosted install: Apache Superset includes both at no cost, and that is the whole argument.
- You embed analytics for customers: Metabase counts every embed user as a billable seat, while Lightdash charges a flat platform fee instead.
- Definitions must live in version control: Evidence keeps reports in git, and Lightdash keeps metrics in dbt.
- You want a licence with no commercial carve-out anywhere: Redash is BSD-2-Clause and has no paid edition to hold anything back.
Common questions
Common questions about Metabase alternatives
What is the best Metabase alternative in 2026?
Apache Superset, for one specific reason: its free Apache-2.0 self-host includes the two capabilities Metabase withholds from its free edition, namely row-level security filters and enterprise authentication through Flask-AppBuilder. If you want to stop paying per seat entirely, Lightdash Cloud Pro is a flat $3,000 per month for unlimited users. If your reports can live in git as SQL and markdown, Evidence is MIT licensed and needs no seat meter at all when you host it yourself. Redash is the most permissive licence here at BSD-2-Clause, with no commercial edition to withhold anything.
Is Metabase free, and what does the free edition leave out?
Metabase Open Source is free, AGPL licensed outside the repository's enterprise directory, and it explicitly includes unlimited users, unlimited questions and dashboards, 20+ data sources and the SQL editor. No row, dashboard or seat cap exists on it. What it leaves out is governance: row- and column-level permissions, SAML, JWT, OIDC and SCIM, usage analytics and auditing, serialization, white labeling, caching controls and air-gapped deployment are all paid features. Google Sign-in and LDAP do work on the free edition, so it is SAML-less rather than SSO-less.
How much does Metabase cost in 2026?
From Metabase's own pricing page: Starter is $100 per month, or $90 per month billed yearly ($1,080 per year), and includes the first 5 users, then $6 per user per month. Pro is $575 per month, or $517.50 per month billed yearly ($6,210 per year), and includes the first 10 users, then $12 per user per month. Enterprise starts at $20,000 per year and is feature-identical to Pro by Metabase's own admission. There is no stated seat minimum on any plan, but Starter is Metabase Cloud only, so on a self-hosted install the ladder is free, then $575 per month.
Which Metabase alternatives are genuinely open source?
Four of the six, and the distinctions matter. Apache Superset is Apache-2.0 under the Apache Software Foundation, and Rill is Apache-2.0, both with no proprietary carve-out. Redash is BSD-2-Clause, the most permissive on this page and the only project here with no enterprise directory at all. Evidence is MIT. Lightdash is MIT with a carve-out: everything under packages/backend/src/ee is governed by that directory's own licence. Metabase itself is AGPL outside its enterprise directory, where the Metabase Commercial License applies instead. Data Studio is proprietary and cannot be self-hosted.
Which alternative does not charge per seat?
Lightdash is the explicit answer: Cloud Pro is a flat $3,000 per month for unlimited users, and the pricing page headline is literally about not paying per seat to look at your own data. Self-hosted Superset, Redash, Rill and Evidence have no seat meter either, because there is no vendor in the loop. Watch the hosted versions instead: Preset charges $20 per user per month billed annually, Evidence Cloud $15 or $25 per user per month, and Rill Cloud charges per seat and separately for compute at $0.15 per compute-unit-hour.
How hard is it to migrate off Metabase?
Plan a rebuild, not an import. Every tool here stores questions and dashboards in its own schema, so nothing transfers automatically, and Metabase's own serialization export is itself a paid feature. What does move is the SQL: your queries are portable, and in a warehouse-first tool like Lightdash or Rill they become part of a semantic layer rather than one-off saved questions. The practical approach is to run both for a quarter, rebuild only the dashboards people actually open, and keep the free Metabase instance alive as the ad-hoc question tool while the governed reporting moves.