Apache Superset vs Metabase

Superset usually has the lower license bill because it has no paid edition, but the running cost depends on what you operate around it. Metabase's Open Source edition is also free, yet the Starter and Pro plans are published per month, with Starter at $100 per month or $90 per month billed yearly with the first 5 users included, and Pro at $575 per month or $517.50 per month billed yearly with the first 10 users included, according to the Metabase pricing page. Additional users cost $6 (Starter) or $12 (Pro) per month. Ask both vendors and your own platform team what each cost driver adds up to: hosting, the metadata database, a cache and worker tier for Superset, and the admin hours for upgrades in each case.

No. Superset is Apache-2.0 licensed and has no paid edition, so OAuth2 providers such as Google and Azure, custom OAuth2 servers using the code flow, and LDAP are configured in the open-source product. Group-to-role mapping uses AUTH_ROLES_MAPPING in the configuration. The effort lies in configuring the identity provider, testing sign-in in staging, and deciding how groups map to roles. Confirm the exact group claims your identity provider sends before you build role mappings, because mismatched claims are a common source of access problems.

On Metabase's pricing page, SSO, row and column level permissions, multi-tenant data segregation, and usage analytics and auditing are included only in the Pro and Enterprise plans. Open Source and Starter do not include them. Within identity, JWT, OIDC, SAML with documented setups for Auth0, Entra ID, Google, Keycloak and Okta, advanced LDAP group and attribute sync, and SCIM provisioning also require Pro or Enterprise, according to Metabase's people and groups documentation. Google sign-in and LDAP remain available on the open-source and Starter plans. List the access rules and audit requirements you need before you pick a plan, since those drive the upgrade.

It depends on who builds the dashboards. Metabase is aimed at non-technical users who can ask questions through a point-and-click interface, so analysts with little SQL can build many charts. Superset offers a no-code chart builder, but its SQL IDE, SQL Lab, and semantic layer reward analysts who write queries and define metrics. A mixed team usually needs at least one person who can write SQL and maintain shared definitions, whichever tool you choose. Run a pilot with your real questions and see how many of them business users can answer without help.

Yes, both are self-hostable, and many teams run them internally. The work that most often needs experienced help is production setup: choosing and backing up a PostgreSQL or MySQL metadata database, deciding whether to run Redis and Celery workers for alerts, reports and async queries, and building a repeatable upgrade path. Superset's architecture documentation says SQLite and the Docker Compose PostgreSQL container are not recommended for production. Metabase recommends PostgreSQL for its application database rather than its embedded H2 database. DeployOpen plans, implements, hardens, backs up, upgrades and documents self-hosted platforms in your infrastructure under a fixed-scope written agreement, and ongoing support is available as a retainer. Ask for the written scope before deciding which parts to keep in-house.

Plan for people who can operate a web application, a relational database, and for Superset, a cache and worker layer. Your staff will need to handle backups, monitoring, secret management and identity configuration, along with a test environment for upgrades. Superset requires a user-specified SECRET_KEY to start and supports rotating it with PREVIOUS_SECRET_KEY, so someone must own that process. Upgrades involve backing up the metadata database, running superset db upgrade and superset init, and checking UPDATING.md for breaking changes. Metabase runs application migrations automatically, and its docs recommend a backup first and reducing a cluster to one node for major upgrades. Confirm your team's capacity for these tasks before committing.

The duration depends on the size of your dashboard estate, how many saved queries and metric definitions must be rebuilt, how permissions are modeled, and how many data sources are involved. Moving dashboards is rarely a direct export, so the work is largely rebuilding logic in the new tool. Metabase's H2 application database can be moved with a one-time load-from-h2 command, but it must run with the same Metabase version that last updated the file, according to Metabase's migration documentation. Map your permission model and identity groups first, since those usually set the critical path. Ask any implementation partner for a written scope and timeline based on an inventory of your dashboards.

For most internal use, the AGPL does not prevent you from running Metabase, but its terms matter if you modify Metabase and make it available to others over a network, or if you embed it in a product. Metabase's LICENSE.txt states that the source outside the top-level enterprise directory is AGPL licensed while code inside it is under the Metabase Commercial License. Superset is Apache-2.0 licensed, which has different obligations. Have your legal team review how you plan to use, modify and distribute either tool, especially for customer-facing embedding. This is a licensing question for counsel, not a conclusion this page can settle.