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by Cyphase 900 days ago
Do you have any thoughts on Superset? Did you consider it as a candidate?

For anyone who doesn't know: https://superset.apache.org/

(There's at least one service that offers managed Superset hosting if that's what you're looking for; it's easy to find so I won't link it here.)
2 comments
code_biologist 895 days ago
I recently ran a little shootout between Superset, Metabase, and Lightdash — all open source with hosted options. All have nontrivial weaknesses but I ended up picking Lightdash.

Superset the best of them at data visualization but I honestly found it almost useless for self-serve BI by business users if you have existing star schema. This issue on how to do joins in Superset (with stalebot making a mess XD) is everything difficult about Superset for BI in a nutshell. https://github.com/apache/superset/issues/8645

Metabase is pretty great and it's definitely the right choice for a startup looking to get low cost BI set up. It still has a very table centric view, but feels built for _BI_ rather than visualization alone.

Lightdash has significant warts (YAML, pivoting being done in the frontend, no symmetric aggregates) but the Looker inspiration is obvious and it makes it easy to present _groups of tables_ to business users ready to rock. I liked Looker before Google acquired it. My business users are comfortable with star and snowflake schemas (not that they know those words) and it was easy to drop Lightdash on top of our existing data warehouse.

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lawrjone 900 days ago
I don’t think we did consider this, probably because we have a preference to buy instead of build with tools like these and prefer a team who can respond to our feedback.

It looks like a promising tool though! I’m sure we’ll blog about our experience with the new tooling once we’ve moved over, the team will no doubt have a lot to say about it.

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Cyphase 900 days ago
I had a feeling from the article and your comments, which is why I mentioned the hosted service. :)

From their website[0]:

> Preset was founded by the original creator of Apache Superset™. Our team of experts contributes over 75% of all commits to the open-source software project.

I'd be interested to see your blog post, regardless of tool.

[0] https://preset.io/

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