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Metabase Blog
metabase.com · Company blog · on HN since 2015
The company behind Metabase, an open-source business intelligence tool, posts product news, hiring notices and security incident reports.
What HN saysCommenters recommend Metabase for reporting dashboards, citing easy Docker setup, a gentle learning curve and good self-hosting, and it also appears in hiring threads.
132HN people shared it
97linked it in comments
90stories submitted
1.3Kstory points
3 months agolast shared
2015people per year2026
Most-shared posts
- 1Show HN: Metabase, an open-source business intelligence tool67 people · 304 points · first shared 2015 · 121 comments on HN
- 2Jobs6 people · first shared 2016
- 3So about those Joins (2016)4 people · 1 points · first shared 2017 · discussion on HN
- 4Show HN: Metabase Cloud3 people · 39 points · first shared 2020 · 8 comments on HN
- 5Metabase security incident post-mortem: July 20233 people · 5 points · first shared 2023 · discussion on HN
- 60-day security update available for Metabase3 people · 4 points · first shared 2026 · discussion on HN
- 7Upgrade your Metabase installation IMMEDIATELY3 people · 1 points · first shared 2023 · 1 comments on HN
- 8330+ data teams share what's working (and what's not)2 people · 30 points · first shared 2025 · 6 comments on HN
- 9Show HN: We built an AI Agent to reproduce bugs2 people · 8 points · first shared 2026 · discussion on HN
- 10Bus Factor of top GitHub projects2 people · 6 points · first shared 2022 · 1 comments on HN
- 11Metabase 0.43 Released2 people · 5 points · first shared 2022 · discussion on HN
- 12Enterprise Edition of Metabase source available2 people · 4 points · first shared 2020 · discussion on HN
- 13Common types of bias when working with data2 people · 3 points · first shared 2021 · discussion on HN
- 14Urgent security advisory for Metabase (new)2 people · 3 points · first shared 2023 · 1 comments on HN
- 15Running metabase on docker2 people · first shared 2022
What HN people wrote when they linked it
salsakran · 2024-01-02
Metabase | https://metabase.com | REMOTE | Full-time | Backend, Frontend, Full Stack, and DevOps engineers
Metabase is open source analytics software that lets anyone in your company rummage around in the databases you have. It connects to a number of databases / data warehouses (BigQuery, Redshift, Snowflake, Postgres, MySQL, etc).
People rather like the product (metabase.com/love). We're a remote team full of people who care about user experience, making complicated things as simple as possible and building things. We have a deeply pragmatic engineering culture and value building things that people actually use vs whatever closes a deal or makes for a good press release.
Tech stack: Clojure, Typescript, React, Redux, AWS
Roles: Engineering Managers, Data Analysts, Frontend/DevOps/Backend Engineering, Success Engineers, and more.
See https://www.metabase.com/jobs
reneberlin · 2023-06-08
If you're too tired to code in your spare time there is also:
https://www.metabase.com/
Which is of course much more under the hood than just the frontend, but it's trivial to setup with docker and the learning curve is a joke.
Plus: your sql-skills create great charts :) and the dashboards can be shared. Another new option is easily embedding created charts and dashboards into other websites.
msantos · 2023-05-13
The solution really depends on what sort of problems you are trying to solve and who your customers are.
There are a fair few low-code solutions out there for reporting and data visualisation that are great for finance and marketing teams for example. e.g. https://metabase.com/ , https://evidence.dev/
For multipurpose SMB workflows and organisational processes, I have used n8n in the recent past and found it was quite good and incredibly easy to maintain. https://n8n.io/engineering-resources/
For enterprise processes I'd go with Camunda (solely based on recommendations and not first hand experience). Although only parts of their platform are OSS https://github.com/camunda
Bear in mind that some of these are not suitable if you want to build something that competes with them while taking their OSS code. But are perfectly fine otherwise.
fantalamera · 2021-07-18
I can strongly recommend Metabase (https://www.metabase.com). Currently we're using this for all reporting dashboards for customers at Coast (https://coastapp.com). We connect our main MySQL DB and other data sources, and product people can write queries/visualizations/dashboards for customers without engineering effort. They support white-labelling and embedding in web apps.
crunchtoinfo · 2021-01-28
I can confirm that self-hosted is the best of both worlds: fully private and you control the access through your own infrastructure and all works in the browser. This simplicity is important for many small-medium companies. That is why my go-to tools for adhoc data slicing by non-technical users is https://www.metabase.com. I hope that Airbyte/dbt will be the ELT complement. And I hope to find a way to contribute.
tlrobinson · 2020-07-01
Metabase | Software Engineer | San Francisco, CA | REMOTE or ONSITE, FULL-TIME | http://www.metabase.com/
We’re a small well-funded team building beautiful open source business intelligence tools used by over 17,000 companies.
React frontend, Clojure backend. Most of the work we do is open source. We’re looking to hire strong frontend, backend, generalist, and sales engineers.
If you love open source, building beautiful products, and working with data, apply at http://www.metabase.com/jobs
fragosti · 2020-05-28
I'm a big fan of Firebase and have seen a lot of projects get up and running very quickly and scale as well.
However, I think there are an increasing amount of reasons why you want to have your data stored in a SQL database that you can access. The open source tooling being built around SQL (usually Postgres) as a standard is becoming better and better and it's going to be hard for Firebase to compete with all those offerings. If I run a Postgres database I can instantly have tools like Hasura [0], Metabase [1] along with others that add a ton of value out of the box. However, maybe those tools will also integrate with Firebase.
Anyway, my point is that this is best of both worlds, so great to see!
[0] https://github.com/hasura/graphql-engine
[1] https://www.metabase.com/
cetra3 · 2020-04-15
Also see metabase: https://www.metabase.com/
We use this to embed some nice dashboards & run queries to great effect. A very powerful tool!
jbrooksuk · 2019-01-02
On BI solutions, we’ve been using Metabase[1] a lot at work and it’s been fantastic.
[1] https://Metabase.com
agacera · 2017-10-11
I use and recommend metabase and redash.
Metabase is more polished and easier for business folks. But redash supports more data sources (hive for instance).
Both are open source and in my opinion can fill about 80% of dashboards and ad hoc analysis for a small to medium company. The other 20 % your company must be rich enough to buy Tableau or rich enough to build its own solution.
https://www.metabase.com
https://redash.io
nileshtrivedi · 2017-02-08
Metabase is another great open-source tool: http://www.metabase.com/
perivamsi · 2024-09-04
Metabase | https://metabase.com | REMOTE | Full-time | Backend Engineers, Frontend Engineers, and Engineering Managers
Metabase is open source analytics software that lets anyone in your company rummage around in the databases you have. It connects to a number of databases / data warehouses (BigQuery, Redshift, Snowflake, Postgres, MySQL, etc).
People rather like the product (https://metabase.com/love). We're a remote team full of people who care about user experience, making complicated things as simple as possible and building things. We have a deeply pragmatic engineering culture and value building things that people actually use vs whatever closes a deal or makes for a good press release.
Tech stack: Clojure, Typescript, React, Redux, AWS https://github.com/metabase/metabase
Please apply here https://www.metabase.com/jobs and then email me at vamsi@metabase, I'll find your application internally and review it
vijucat · 2022-02-14
I love Metabase (https://www.metabase.com/) and used it successfully with business users, too (small hedge fund). If it's not too much data, getting it out as .csv and using R + data.table + dplyr, etc; = incredible productivity. See [1]
Use Excel, QlikSense and Tableau if Business Users need visualization. Excel pivot tables = OG data reshaping. Resist more complicated solutions : do you really need more than Excel?
QlikSense doesn't get enough love. It's actually better than Tableau at some scenarios. Or PowerBI if you're a Microsoft shop. Last time I checked, Power BI's Q&A [2] was a KILLER FEATURE. "Show me Sales per Region, Quarterly" and then you get to fine tune it. R and Shiny dashboards = last resort; too much bespoke work. 2 months using R + Shiny can be 1 week in Tableau / QlikSense / PowerBI.
1. "Efficient reshaping using data.tables" https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/data.table/vignettes/datatable…
2. https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/power-bi/natural-language/q-and-a-int…
_1tan · 2019-05-11
Looks great! How does this compare to https://metabase.com/?
gcardinal · 2026-05-07
I'm under no illusion I'll suddenly shatter your world views with this, but in case it's as useful to you as it was to me, you might want to check out Metabase[1].
You can self-host and if all you care about is showing data in a digestible format to stakeholders, it's really simple. You can of course go overboard and regret all of your life's decisions with it, but I try and abstain myself.
[1]: https://www.metabase.com/
ramirond · 2025-05-21
Thanks for the shout! I recommend this video about our Clojure journey: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vUe3slLHk20
We are also hiring Clojure devs: https://www.metabase.com/jobs
no_wizard · 2025-04-07
>with Meatabase
They mean Metabase, though Meatabase could get interesting as a product
https://www.metabase.com
hisamafahri · 2024-07-05
If I were to really invest in dbms, and only able to read-only the data (analyze, query, etc) something like Metabase is my go to choice (https://www.metabase.com).
If I also need update the data itself, internal tools builder like Retool (https://retool.com) probably good enough.
But, it all depends on the use case.
swaraj · 2024-05-16
We're all on on https://www.sigmacomputing.com/ bc we don't like hosting/managing/provisioning essential tools like this + this seems more complicated to configured.
I would recommend a simpler setup like Metabase Docker (which I re-evaluated recently): https://www.metabase.com/docs/latest/installation-and-operation/runnin…
Rodeoclash · 2023-07-21
https://www.metabase.com/blog/security-advisory
* What happened?
We were informed by a third party security researcher that they discovered a vulnerability in Metabase.
* What is the severity of the vulnerability?
Extremely severe. An unauthenticated attacker can run arbitrary commands with the same privileges as the Metabase server on the server you are running Metabase on.
* Has this been exploited?
To the best of our current knowledge, there has been no known exploitation of this vulnerability. We audited our own systems, and were not able to find any malicious use of this.
tsm · 2023-06-06
I write Clojure for https://www.metabase.com/
Lots of interesting problems involving working with different database engines, processing data, compiler design, etc.
cnasc · 2023-06-05
Based on tsm’s profile: https://www.metabase.com/
Looks like a Clojure backend
ghiculescu · 2023-02-21
If you can connect it to the data source, Metabase is exactly what you want. https://www.metabase.com/
the_angry_angel · 2022-01-30
If you’re selling dashboarding, you need to show that dashboarding really quickly. I looked at the site, skipped through the video and saw nothing. I did see something on the docs site, but I was lost at that point.
You are competing with https://grafana.com/, https://www.metabase.com/, https://superset.apache.org/, etc.
iyn · 2021-12-01
Metabase (https://www.metabase.com/) is a similar tool. It supports less DBs but I had good experiences with it at a couple of startups, it's quite easy to build useful queries, even for not technical people. I'm yet to play with Superset, I've been meaning to use it for a while. Anybody who has experience with both can share their thoughts on pros/cons depending on use cases?
vishnumohandas · 2021-10-12
> CI
GitHub Actions
> deployments/rollbacks
Docker. Scaleway offers a container registry that's ridiculously cheap[1]. Deployments are infrequent and executed manually.
> DBs
Again, Scaleway's managed RDS[2].
Outside these, we have setup Grafana + Loki cloud[3] for monitoring and alerting. They have a generous free plan.
For product analytics that can be derived from our database we've a self hosted instance of Metabase[4].
[1]: https://www.scaleway.com/en/container-registry/
[2]: https://www.scaleway.com/en/database/
[3]: https://grafana.com/
[4]: https://www.metabase.com/
P.S. We were a 1 person company when most of this was setup. We're 3 now, works just as well.
CameronNemo · 2021-10-06
There are a lot of interesting postgres front ends that could be useful. Supabase, metabase, postgrest, hasura.
https://supabase.io/
https://www.metabase.com/
https://postgrest.org/
https://hasura.io/
Of course grafana too, but that goes beyond just PostgreSQL.
mamcx · 2021-05-03
In my niche this is reporting. We agonize for YEARS about what to do.
Just thinking in what I need to do for this do "properly", ie: I plan to make a language as the base!(https://tablam.org).
Eventually I just install https://www.metabase.com and thanks to sane table + view design the end-users are nearly support-free.
conzar · 2021-04-18
For read-only, we use Metabase at work.
https://www.metabase.com
chordol · 2021-03-05
https://www.metabase.com/
It’s open source BI tool which works nice out of the box and it’s low maintenance. Dashboards are you easy to create. It connects to a bunch of DBs.