Metabase vs Microsoft Power BI
Metabase and Microsoft Power BI are both business intelligence software. Metabase is open source under a license set out in its repository, with 50k GitHub stars. Microsoft Power BI is a commercial product from Microsoft.
Which to pick
- Pick Metabase when
- A small or mid-size company wants self-serve reporting that non-analysts can use quickly.
- Pick Microsoft Power BI when
- An organisation on Microsoft 365 wants low-cost BI that Excel users can pick up.
Side by side
A BI tool where non-technical staff ask questions of databases through a query builder, plus SQL, dashboards, alerts and embedded analytics.
Microsoft's BI tool for modelling data, building reports and dashboards, and sharing them through Microsoft 365 and Fabric.
The open edition is AGPL; SSO, row-level permissions and white-label embedding need a paid plan.
The desktop authoring tool is Windows-only, and capacity licensing through Fabric can get confusing.
Production-ready (both)
Self-hosted server and cloud service
Desktop app and cloud service
Clojure, TypeScript and React
DAX and Power Query
Open source, license unclear on GitHub
Closed source, sold by Microsoft
GitHub could not read the license. Check it in the repository before reusing any code.
Closed source: you use it under the maker's terms and cannot change or resell the code.
50k GitHub stars
2.5k Wikipedia readers a month on phones
Established: started 11 years ago, latest release v0.65.2.
Not known
Other comparisons
More business intelligence and dashboard tools
Both sides were judged on 2026-11-03 from makers' descriptions, Wikipedia, READMEs and GitHub data. License, age and popularity lines are worked out directly.