Metabase vs Tableau
Metabase and Tableau are both business intelligence software. Metabase is open source under a license set out in its repository, with 50k GitHub stars. Tableau is a commercial product from Salesforce, Inc.
Which to pick
- Pick Metabase when
- A small or mid-size company wants self-serve reporting that non-analysts can use quickly.
- Pick Tableau when
- Analysts need flexible visual exploration and polished dashboards across many data sources.
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.
Data visualisation and BI with drag-and-drop exploration, dashboards and governed sharing via Tableau Cloud or Server.
The open edition is AGPL; SSO, row-level permissions and white-label embedding need a paid plan.
Per-user licences are expensive and its direction is now shaped by Salesforce.
Production-ready (both)
Self-hosted server and cloud service
Desktop app, cloud service and self-hosted server
Clojure, TypeScript and React
Not published
Open source, license unclear on GitHub
Closed source, sold by Salesforce, Inc.
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
1.5k 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.