Superset vs Tableau
Superset and Tableau are both business intelligence software. Superset is open source under Apache-2.0, with 75k GitHub stars. Tableau is a commercial product from Salesforce, Inc.
Which to pick
- Pick Superset when
- A data team wants a free, scalable BI tool and has engineers to deploy and maintain it.
- Pick Tableau when
- Analysts need flexible visual exploration and polished dashboards across many data sources.
Side by side
A BI web application for exploring data, building charts and dashboards and running SQL against most SQL databases.
Data visualisation and BI with drag-and-drop exploration, dashboards and governed sharing via Tableau Cloud or Server.
Operating it (Python, Redis, a metadata database, caching, upgrades) takes real effort; Preset sells a hosted version.
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
Python, Flask, TypeScript, React, Redis and PostgreSQL
Not published
Open source, Apache-2.0 (permissive)
Closed source, sold by Salesforce, Inc.
You can build it into a product you sell, as long as you keep its copyright notice.
Closed source: you use it under the maker's terms and cannot change or resell the code.
75k GitHub stars
1.5k Wikipedia readers a month on phones
Established: started 11 years ago, latest release 6.1.0.
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.