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by schlowmo 2525 days ago
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.