Metabase: Self-Hosted Business Intelligence

Metabase is an open-source business intelligence tool that lets anyone in your organization ask questions about data and understand the answers — no SQL required. With over 45,000 GitHub stars, Metabase provides fast analytics with a friendly UX that connects directly to your databases and produces interactive dashboards, charts, and reports. Non-technical users can explore data through a point-and-click query builder while power users have full SQL access.

Self-hosting Metabase means your business data and analytics queries never leave your infrastructure, and you get unlimited users and dashboards without per-seat licensing.

Key Features

• Point-and-click query builder that lets non-technical users explore data without writing SQL
• Interactive dashboards with filters, drill-down, and auto-refresh for real-time monitoring
• Native connectors for PostgreSQL, MySQL, MongoDB, BigQuery, Snowflake, and 20+ databases
• SQL editor with autocomplete, syntax highlighting, and parameterized queries for power users
• Scheduled email reports and Slack alerts for automated data delivery
• Embedded analytics with iframe embedding and full white-label customization
• Collection-based organization with granular permissions per team and role
• Data model layer for defining metrics, segments, and friendly column names

Why Self-Host Metabase?

Data stays in your network. Metabase connects directly to your databases. Self-hosting means your business data, query patterns, and dashboard insights never traverse external servers. This is essential for companies with compliance requirements or sensitive data.

Unlimited users at zero cost. Metabase's open-source edition has no per-user pricing. Every person in your organization can access dashboards, run queries, and build reports without adding to your bill. Cloud BI tools charge per seat, which gets expensive fast.

Connect to private databases. Self-hosted Metabase lives inside your network and connects directly to databases that aren't exposed to the internet — production replicas, data warehouses, and internal services. No VPN tunnels or firewall exceptions for a cloud service.

Custom deployment control. You decide where Metabase runs, which version to use, when to update, and how to back up. Integrate it into your existing infrastructure, run it alongside your databases, and configure SSO with your identity provider.

System Requirements

Resource	Minimum	Recommended
CPU	2 vCPUs	4+ vCPUs
RAM	2 GB	4 GB
Storage	10 GB SSD	20 GB SSD
OS	Ubuntu 22.04+	Ubuntu 24.04

Metabase runs on the JVM and benefits from generous memory allocation. Dashboard rendering and complex queries across large datasets are the primary resource consumers. For teams with heavy dashboard usage, 4 GB RAM ensures responsive performance.

Getting Started

The fastest way to deploy Metabase on your VPS is with Docker Compose through Dokploy. Our step-by-step deployment guide walks you through the full setup, including persistent storage, environment configuration, and SSL.

Deploy Metabase with Dokploy →

Alternatives

• Apache Superset — Enterprise-grade data exploration and visualization platform with advanced charting
• Grafana — Observability platform that excels at time-series dashboards and monitoring
• Redash — Query-focused analytics tool for teams that prefer writing SQL over visual builders
• Lightdash — dbt-native BI tool that builds metrics layer from your dbt models

FAQ

Is Metabase free to self-host? Yes. Metabase's open-source edition (AGPL license) is completely free to self-host with no user limits. Metabase also offers a paid Pro/Enterprise edition with additional features like row-level permissions, advanced caching, and priority support.

Can non-technical users actually use Metabase? Yes — this is Metabase's core strength. The visual query builder lets users select tables, filter data, group results, and create charts without writing any SQL. Saved questions and curated collections mean most users can find answers from pre-built dashboards.

What databases does Metabase connect to? Metabase natively supports PostgreSQL, MySQL, MariaDB, MongoDB, SQLite, SQL Server, Oracle, BigQuery, Snowflake, Redshift, Presto, Spark SQL, and more. Community drivers extend support to additional databases.

How does Metabase compare to Grafana? Metabase focuses on business intelligence — ad-hoc data exploration, reports, and dashboards for business users. Grafana specializes in monitoring and observability with time-series data. Metabase is better for asking questions about business data; Grafana is better for infrastructure and application monitoring.

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App data sourced from selfh.st open-source directory.