We have looked into metabase ourselves initially as well but found it lacking compared to Superset. What are your thoughts on that?
Note that we build dashboards for customers that end up having some complex SQL directly in Superset.
Note that we build dashboards for customers that end up having some complex SQL directly in Superset.
The data that goes into those insights can be quite complex and the queries are actually threading JSON parameters through into BigQuery SQL queries using JavaScript UDFs to power the filters in the dashboard (show incidents with these custom field values). This works pretty well with signed Metabase dashboard links.
We have hit limitations with Metabase though. Performance of the instance can be a bit unpredictable and their support has been poor when things do go wrong, with very little willingness to take our feedback into account for new product features.
For that reason and more (such as more flexible dashboards) we’re going to move ourselves to Omni (https://omni.co/) for internal business analytics use cases, and will reconsider Metabase for our customer facing product dashboards when we do. Omni may work for these or we might build them bespoke, we’ll see at the time.
For anyone who doesn't know: https://superset.apache.org/
(There's at least one service that offers managed Superset hosting if that's what you're looking for; it's easy to find so I won't link it here.)
It looks like a promising tool though! I’m sure we’ll blog about our experience with the new tooling once we’ve moved over, the team will no doubt have a lot to say about it.
From their website[0]:
> Preset was founded by the original creator of Apache Superset™. Our team of experts contributes over 75% of all commits to the open-source software project.
I'd be interested to see your blog post, regardless of tool.
Superset the best of them at data visualization but I honestly found it almost useless for self-serve BI by business users if you have existing star schema. This issue on how to do joins in Superset (with stalebot making a mess XD) is everything difficult about Superset for BI in a nutshell. https://github.com/apache/superset/issues/8645
Metabase is pretty great and it's definitely the right choice for a startup looking to get low cost BI set up. It still has a very table centric view, but feels built for _BI_ rather than visualization alone.
Lightdash has significant warts (YAML, pivoting being done in the frontend, no symmetric aggregates) but the Looker inspiration is obvious and it makes it easy to present _groups of tables_ to business users ready to rock. I liked Looker before Google acquired it. My business users are comfortable with star and snowflake schemas (not that they know those words) and it was easy to drop Lightdash on top of our existing data warehouse.