With several BI Tools available on the market today, it can be difficult selecting the right one for YOU. When making a selection it is important to not only consider cost but also capabilities and scalability. Below we’ve outlined a comparison between two very popular tools – Tableau and Metabase. If you’re exploring these two tools, hopefully this will help you make an informed decision!
Advantages of using Metabase vs. Tableau:
- It is fairly simple to use, and learn, compared to Tableau.
- It as friendly overall user interface
- it is very easy to join tables on keys
- It has unique features:
Share reports automatically. You can email reports or dashboards daily / monthly / or after any specified time period directly to an email list.
Drag and drop visualizations. It is EASIER to drag and drop tables/ visualizations onto dashboards compared to Tableau. If the data is fed correctly through a database, visualizations can be created simply by dragging and dropping.
Creating dashboards is a breeze! A beginner with no experience can easily build dashboards to create visualizations.
(The tool provides certain suggestions such as aggregates on which visualizations can be built – like calculating the mean of a particular column. For example, Metabase may suggest calculating the mean order amount by customer, and will calculate it for you.)
By creating these dashboards and using data analytics services, you can obtain valuable insights that can help you optimize your business processes to increase growth and profits.
Disadvantages of using Metabase vs. Tableau:
- Lack of flexibility
Poor filtering. We tried to create a filter that can filter data based on orders in the last x days and could not accomplish that in Metabase. Instead, we had to create separate visualizations for each of: yesterday, last 90 days, last 60 days, last 30 days.
No formatting flexibility. We could not add custom labels or change colors.
- Lack of resources
Metabase has a lot fewer tutorials and community support at this point, making it even more unfriendly to beginners.
- Highly reliant on SQL
There were many duplicates in the dashboard that we created. It was impossible to filter the duplicates through Metabase.
- Fewer collaboration options
There is no way to share dashboards other than through an email.
Here’s an at-a-glance look at the pros and cons
Pros
| Tableau | Metabase |
| Offers a free trial | Lower price point compared with similar tools |
| User friendly; easy-to-use UI; simple set up process | Great for beginners, user friendly; easy-to-use UI; |
| Extensive analytics & reporting options available | Offers a 14-day free trial |
| Wide variety of deployment options | |
| 24/7 Support available | |
| Variety of training resources available | |
| Mobile friendly |
Cons
| Tableau | Metabase |
| Higher price point | Limited analytics; no benchmarking |
| Poor Versioning | Limited deployment options |
| No customer support available | |
| Limited training resources | |
| Limited Graphing capabilities | |
| No Desktop version |
If you’re looking for a free data visualization tool for some basic graphs and you want to do it yourself using SQL, then Metabase may be a great tool for you. On the other hand, Tableau desktop version costs $70 and will allow you to join data between databases and Excel, customize queries against data and build some very sophisticated graphs with filters – and much more.
