Metabase

Metabase, Inc. is a venture-funded software company with an office in San Francisco; structured data on its website gives a founding date of February 2015. It builds an open-source business intelligence and embedded analytics tool that lets non-technical staff query company data without writing SQL.

Metabase connects to more than 20 sources such as PostgreSQL, MySQL, BigQuery, Snowflake, Redshift, Databricks and ClickHouse. Users build questions with a visual query builder or a SQL editor, assemble dashboards with filters and drill-through, and receive subscriptions and alerts. Data Studio lets analysts curate a governed semantic layer of reusable metrics, while Metabot answers plain-English questions through chat and an MCP server. An embedding SDK supports white-label, multi-tenant analytics. Logos on the site include Capital One, Deutsche Telekom, McDonald's, Hugging Face and Mistral AI.

• Visual query builder: Non-technical users filter, summarize and join data without SQL.
• SQL editor and snippets: Analysts write native queries with reusable, parameterized snippets.
• Dashboards and alerts: Interactive dashboards with filters, drill-through, subscriptions and alerts.
• Data Studio: Curate a semantic layer of vetted tables and reusable metric definitions.
• Metabot AI: Ask questions in plain English via chat or an MCP server and get charts back.
• Embedded analytics SDK: White-label, multi-tenant dashboards inside customer-facing products.

A Vietnamese e-commerce SME can self-host Metabase on its PostgreSQL database to give sales and marketing teams daily dashboards at no licence cost. A SaaS company can embed white-label dashboards for its business customers. A retail chain can let store managers ask Metabot about revenue by branch.

The open-source edition is free with unlimited users and can be self-hosted with a single Docker command, which lowers the entry cost for small data teams. Business users explore data through a visual builder and plain-English questions to Metabot, reducing ad-hoc report requests. Pro adds row- and column-level permissions, SSO and white-label embedding for customer-facing analytics. Metabase states it is used by more than 100,000 companies.

Companies in Southeast Asia increasingly want self-service reporting on their own databases without large BI licence bills, and open-source tools let them start small and scale. Natural-language querying and semantic layers are becoming standard so that AI answers rely on agreed metric definitions.

Metabase, Inc. lists a founding date of 2015 and an office in downtown San Francisco; it describes itself as venture funded. The project has about 49.9k GitHub stars. Metabase states SOC 2 Type II and SOC 1 certifications and supports GDPR and CCPA compliance.