Metabase Pricing in May 2026

Metabase's pricing follows tiered structure: Open Source self-hosted is genuinely free under AGPLv3, Cloud Starter at $85/month for managed hosting, Cloud Pro at $500/month, Enterprise custom-quote. Self-hosted Metabase is feature-complete for OSS users.

The Free Self-Hosted offer is genuinely valuable. The strategic decision: Metabase's value is the user-friendly query builder that covers 80% of what business users need without requiring SQL knowledge, plus a polished dashboard layer that competes with Tableau and Looker for many use cases. For broader BI alternatives, Apache Superset is the closest direct open-source competitor with stronger SQL-first features but a steeper learning curve. Tableau is the dominant commercial alternative and remains the industry standard at enterprise scale. Looker (Google Cloud) targets enterprise with strong governance and modeling layer. Power BI (Microsoft) plays the same role in Microsoft 365 environments. Mode targets analyst-driven workflows with strong SQL and Python notebook integration. Hex competes on similar collaborative analytics with notebook-first approach. Sigma Computing targets enterprise spreadsheet-style analytics. Lightdash and Cube target dbt-first analytics with semantic-layer focus. Redash is another open-source alternative similar to Metabase but with stronger SQL emphasis. For data visualization libraries embedded in apps, Grafana and Apache ECharts target different use cases. For specific industries: Domo targets enterprise with broader data-prep features; Qlik Sense targets enterprise; ThoughtSpot targets natural-language queries. PostHog includes basic SQL queries and dashboards alongside product analytics. For modern analytics stacks: Metabase + dbt + your warehouse covers most needs at much lower cost than Tableau or Looker.