Curious if anyone has used Metabase for serious work and can comment on it. I tried setting it up and got frustrated pretty quickly with the UX. It looks slick, but the mental model was confusing...
My startup seriously evaluated Metabase, but inevitably you'll want joins, and Metabase is fundamentally opposed to the idea: https://metabase.com/blog/Joins/ ... and if you're writing SQL for your views, you might as well be writing SQL.
We ended up shelling out for Tableau - it's pricey at $840/yr, but it supports joins out of the box (it even has a drag-and-drop interface to set up joins!), has practically every bell and whistle you could ask for, and allows you to do "exploratory analysis over screenshare in realtime with non-technical colleagues, without context switching to a coding mindset or needing to look up field names you may never have used before." I think it's intuitive and worth every penny, but YMMV. Would recommend everyone try the public version to get a feel for it.
EDIT: as others have said, Ananas is actually ETL + BI, whereas Metabase and Tableau are BI on top of a database. Tableau can stand in for good ETL due to its join support in certain scenarios. It's better than Metabase, but not necessarily comparable to Ananas.
(I work at Metabase, and am working on the joins feature as we speak)
As getsauce mentioned, we're adding joins to the next release, as well as essentially subqueries in what we're calling the "notebook". That should unlock a lot of power.
I've always been curious if there is a feature in the works for charting or displaying comparisons across defined timespans (e.g. total page views this week vs. last week)
I really wanted to like Metabase but unfortunately it's way behind its promise. I made an attempt to use it in a customer project for creating very basic customizable dashboard-like statistics, with little to no success. Just to name a few pain points:
- using the docker image is easy; not so using the jar file especially due to very little documentation
- confusing UI paired with lack of extensive documentation
- this makes it far from "easy" to be used by "everyone in your company" (quotes from metabase marketing claim): you really have to know how to do things, even easy ones like changing labels
- the UI contains many minor bugs which sometimes lead to unsavable metrics and you have just start from scratch
- no build-in way to export dashboards, which makes it nearly impossible to test your new metrics on a different system before pushing it to production; if you really want to do this, you have to juggle with database dumps
There might be some valid use cases for metabase, but I don't think it's very usable for non-technical users. I strongly suggest to evaluate it thoroughly before counting on it.
Nevertheless thanks for making it open source and free to use, so don't get me wrong.
Metabase is pretty good if you have a nicely configured datawarehouse (Snowflake, Bigquery good options). If you are connecting metabase directly to your app database then you will probably run into issues trying to integrate another data set (say CRM data).
This is where it makes sense to ELT (extract, load, transform) everything into a datawarehouse, integrate the data there and transform as much as possible, and do the "last-mile" analysis in Metabase.
This is at least the theory, I've had reasonable results with metabase doing it this way, also nice in that the bulk of your logic sits in your datawarehouse, so a BI tool migration is less painful, and also possible to run dual analytics tools.
I'm a fan of your work! We use Metabase pretty frequently.
The only nitpicks I have are around the concept of Metrics (still not quite sure what those are or how they're useful for me) and the initial download size of the libraries takes quite a while (especially over unstable VPN links)
I'm wondering if there's a way to have an option where it tries an external CDN first and then falls back to loading from the hosting server.
Thanks for following up! Here's some of things that tripped me up:
1. The lack of in depth docs.
2. The set up and usage of metrics was focusing. This was the main use case I was hoping Metabase could help me with, and it felt like an addon feature.
3. For whatever reason, managing dashboards was really confusing, and the UI [1] didn't seem to match the docs.
Why do charts with dates on the x-axis not show up correctly? For example the chart will show Jan 2019 on the label underneath a column that is actually Feb 2019. This is confusing to new users and drives experienced users up the wall. Currently the only thing that fixes it is to convert the axis to categorical.
