Metabase Review: Pros and Cons of This Simple Yet Powerful BI Tool

Metabase is one of the most accessible and beginner-friendly business intelligence (BI) tools on the market — but does its simplicity help or hurt in real-world analytics? In this article, we’ll dive into the pros and cons of Metabase, explore its features, and share two case studies that reveal when Metabase shines… and when it falls short.

This article is part of our ongoing BI tools review series. Prefer video? A full video version is also available.

What is Metabase? A Quick Overview

Metabase is an open-source BI platform that makes data exploration and dashboard creation incredibly easy. Designed with non-technical users in mind, it offers a no-code interface for building visualizations and answering business questions. But for some, that ease of use can feel limiting — especially compared to more advanced tools like Tableau, Power BI, or Apache Superset.

Let’s take a look at Metabase’s interface, core features, and where it fits in the analytics ecosystem.

User Interface and Core Features

Metabase features a clean and intuitive layout:

• Sidebar: Quick access to datasets and dashboards
• Top menu: Search, and a prominent NEW button for creating assets like:
  • Questions
  • SQL Queries
  • Dashboards
  • Collections
  • Models
  • Metrics (in newer versions)
  • Actions for interactive database updates

“Question” Mode

Metabase encourages users to start with a question — “What do I want to know?” — and builds a SQL query using a visual builder. No manual coding required. Choose fields from dropdowns, click “Visualize,” and your chart is ready.

SQL Query Editor

More advanced users can write custom SQL queries. Just select your dataset, write the code, hit “Play” to run it, and click “Visualize” to create a chart.

Metabase Copilot (AI Assistant)

This free plugin helps speed up workflows by autocompleting queries, identifying issues, and suggesting fixes — great for teams without a dedicated data engineer.

Visualization Options: Simple but Effective

Metabase offers a modest but tasteful set of built-in chart types — it covers most basic needs. 

And with conditional formatting, you can highlight cells or rows based on values — useful for building more informative reports.

Here we set the cell color to change based on its value.

Once your charts are ready, use simple drag-and-drop to arrange them into a dashboard.

What Other Features Are Worth Highlighting?

• Metabase allows you to build models from your data — essentially new tables that can be used as data sources. This is especially useful when preparing data for business users: you can add metadata, column descriptions, or rename fields for clarity.
• Inside models, you can define actions — SQL queries that let users make changes directly to the database. For example, an action can be turned into a button like “Refresh” (to update dashboard data) or “Delete” (to remove a row from the database).
• Metrics allow you to define standard calculation rules used in your company. This speeds up the workflow by avoiding repetitive formula setups across multiple dashboards.
• Collections act like folders where you can organize your questions, dashboards, models, and other items — helping keep everything tidy and easy to manage.

Metabase Pros and Cons

Real-World Use Cases: Successes and Challenges

In our practice there are 2 cases that demonstrate how Metabase peculiarities can do a project both: good and bad.

Case Study 1: When Metabase Simplicity Becomes a Limitation

One of our clients originally managed all their analytics in Google Sheets. Eventually, they realized it was time to upgrade their data operations — automate data collection and processing, implement a data warehouse, and build interactive dashboards. That’s when they reached out to us.

We mutually chose Metabase as the BI platform — primarily because it’s free and easy to use. We quickly built the required dashboards, but not all of them turned out to be effective. In some cases, the client found it more convenient to stick with traditional spreadsheets. As a result, we decided to create table-based views for a few key reports.

While Metabase does support table views, its functionality is so limited that we ran into issues at nearly every step:

• You can’t adjust column width, and the number of columns is restricted.
• There’s no way to freeze rows or columns, which makes scrolling through large tables frustrating.
• Pivot tables lag significantly when scrolling and can only be built using the Question tool.
• And if your calculations can’t be configured through Questions, you’re forced to look for workarounds.

Here’s an example of what their weekly marketing report looked like:

The client wanted a horizontally expanding table — meaning the number of metric rows stayed fixed while new columns were added each week. Unfortunately, Metabase doesn’t support this kind of dynamic column growth. As a workaround, we implemented pagination: each page displayed 10 weeks of data. Want to see week 11? You had to enter “1” in the “Next 10 Pages” input field — not exactly intuitive.

Daily Report Example: 

For daily reporting, the client needed a table with frozen columns that would remain visible while scrolling. Since Metabase lacks native support for this feature, we had to build three separate sub-tables to simulate the effect.

In the end, the client decided to abandon the table-based approach in Metabase altogether.

Key Takeaway:

This case taught us a valuable lesson: sometimes traditional spreadsheets outperform BI platforms for specific use cases. They’re familiar, flexible, and come with features that some lightweight BI tools still lack.

Case Study 2: When Metabase’s Simplicity Is a Winning Advantage

Don’t let the previous example mislead you into thinking Metabase is just a primitive, underpowered BI tool. In fact, we’ve seen firsthand how it can outperform more complex — and expensive — platforms in the right context.

One of our clients initially built their dashboards using Power BI, but the team found the tool cumbersome and unreliable. On their own, they decided to switch to Metabase and began migrating their reports. Eventually, they reached out to our analytics team for support.

Now, here’s where a paradox arises: throughout this article, we’ve described Metabase as simple and user-friendly, yet in this case, the client still needed expert help. That’s because while you can absolutely build basic dashboards without writing a line of SQL, more advanced use cases — like theirs — demand deeper customization and more complex calculations that go beyond what Metabase’s visual Query Builder (Questions) can handle.

Their core request was to recreate existing Power BI dashboards in Metabase and enhance them with more visualizations and KPIs. It’s a bit ironic — they moved to Metabase for a smoother user experience but ended up wanting richer data visualization.

Here’s an example of one of the dashboards we delivered: a Sales Performance Dashboard.

The dashboard featured three tabs: an overview, detailed data by individual customers and products, and sales team performance.

• The overview tab displayed key KPIs using widgets, a pie chart showing sales distribution by location, and bar charts comparing planned vs. actual profit.
  
• This is where the SQL expertise of our analysts came into play — they wrote custom queries to ensure weekend sales were excluded from performance calculations.
  

The second and third tabs were visually similar, so we’ll highlight just one. Both included a pie chart and a data table, with a smart touch: the same color scheme was used across both, making it easier to match visual data with tabular values at a glance.

Conclusion: Is Metabase the Right BI Tool for You?

Metabase is a solid choice for basic business analytics. While it may not offer extensive customization or advanced analytics out of the box, don’t let that stop you — its core features are more than enough to build clear, effective, and informative dashboards with minimal effort.

But it’s important to keep your expectations realistic. Metabase isn’t a silver bullet, and it’s not designed to handle highly complex data workflows.

Who Should Use Metabase:

• Teams on a tight budget or timeline — If you don’t want to invest heavily in tools like Tableau, or get stuck in the complexity of open-source alternatives like Apache Superset, Metabase is a fast, user-friendly solution.
• Companies aiming for self-service analytics — Perfect for teams that want to quickly explore metrics, generate ad hoc reports, or build dashboards minutes before a meeting.

Who Might Need Something Else:

• Teams handling large datasets or advanced analytics — If you need predictive models, complex transformations, or intensive performance, Metabase will fall short.
• Organizations with strict design or customization standards — The free version of Metabase lacks the flexibility to meet highly specific or branded visualization requirements.

We’re official Metabase partners with profound experience visualizing data in the tool. But we’ve also mastered other platforms like Tableau, Looker Studio, and more. Whichever you think is best for you, if you’re looking to get your custom solution, fill in the form and we’ll get back to you shortly to discuss the project.