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by six2seven 2259 days ago
Also see: Apache Superset [0] -- this one looks really like a fully fledged data exploration and visualisation suite, being a possible free and open source alternative to Microsoft Power BI [1]. Using the official / own image can be also deployed as a service running in a local infrastructure.

Would be curious for a comparison between all the mentioned data vis suites in this thread actually.

[0] https://superset.apache.org [1] https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/

1 comments

Quick comparison:

1) Redash and Falcon focus on people that want to do visualizations on top of SQL

2) Superset, Tableau and PowerBI focus on people that want to do visualizations with a UI

3) Metabase and SeekTable focus on people that want to do quick analysis (they are the closest to an Excel replacement)

I have been using group 2) for 3 something years, I am not too excited by them, Superset is cool, Tableau and PowerBI value has been blown out of proportion by marketing. Group 3) is very promising but for some reason more niche although because of their pricing structure they scale as well as Excel (i.e. you can have thousands of users building stuff in Metabase no problem). Group 1) not sure what to say there, I guess it would be my favorite but SQL becomes messy after the first join.

The reality check is that none of those tools stands on its own. Without a database, data prep and security setup they are more or less fancy toys. Unfortunately very few companies understand how to set all of this up in a way that users can actually work with it. So I keep seeing a lot of half done, super expensive, setups in Tableau and PowerBI that have not delivered what they were promising.

Also, I agree with chriddyp that most companies would rather own their analytics for stuff that is customer facing. For internal facing dashboards the dashboarding BI tools are OK (although I lean more on group 3) than group 2)).

> The reality check is that none of those tools stands on its own.

so true! Only exception is maybe CSV data.

Re SeekTable: it also supports usage scenario when data sources ('cubes') are configured by power user (with some IT background), and shares cubes/reports to others that use simple web UI to create their own reports - and this requires paid subscription for publisher only ($25/mo).

And there is another Apache project : Apache Hue, as a django web app I d put between group 1) and 2). Not in 3), because there is not "quick charts", and datasources are not managed at application level but in configuration files and require more "administration" tasks.

https://gethue.com/

Curious where you would consider chart.io to fall in this ecosystem?

I have been using it for its seamless AWS Athena integration to get a handle on load balancer logs when needed. However it is pretty pricey. Would love to move to an open source solution. However my use case feels a little different than what was mentioned above?

In theory you are saving some money for not using a database, redshift is also pricey. Have you considered that? The free solution is python + altair in a jupyter notebook, but you would have to decide if it is worth your time to setup.