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Yes, I am at a company using Metabase, but I have a decent amount of experience with Superset (albeit from many years ago). The reason we chose Metabase was th
by CalRobert 3y ago
Yes, I am at a company using Metabase, but I have a decent amount of experience with Superset (albeit from many years ago).
The reason we chose Metabase was that it had table joins, while Superset doesn't (unless it has added them since I used it). It also looks a bit sleeker. But I strongly prefer Superset; I found that with Metabase I had to turn a lot of things off to make it usable (Let me see "the_table" not "The Table"!), I was constantly annoyed at the opacity around models vs "questions", etc. and every time I wanted to change a question Metabase insisted on creating a new one instead. The real issue here was when we wanted to swap out the data source for a lot of questions but there was no clean way to do so without MB just creating new questions.
Also, Metabase doesn't have serialization unless you pay them AND you self-host, (if I'm self hosting then what exactly am I paying for?) and that's pretty annoying. https://www.metabase.com/docs/latest/installation-and-operation/serialization https://www.metabase.com/docs/latest/installation-and-operat....
But it does let you join tables. Sometimes that's enough to make MB worth dealing with.
- noduerme 3y agoThe "model" vs "question" thing is really annoying as there's no real difference from the user's perspective, and it's easy to accidentally convert a model back to a question without noticing when you publish something. You notice when you try to drill into the chart. There's a lot of annoying manual labor in metabase, e.g. I want to filter something into 10 different charts and I need to duplicate it 10 times and change a filter on each one. Still yeah joins are nice. A non-bugged aggregate count/sum as a window function would be nicer.
- itsoktocry 3y ago>I was constantly annoyed at the opacity around models vs "questions" Yeah, somewhere along the line Metabase decided to get opinionated on "self-serve". I imagine it works well for some teams and companies, but for the tech-oriented, it's annoying. I prefer my BI tools to be platforms that make for easy charting and cross-filters, while I build and control the models behind the scenes with a tool like dbt.
- adlpz 3y agoThanks! Very detailed answer. I've found the weird "make it easy" mindset a bit annoying with Metabase too. The whole questions, nice table names... I'll give Superset a try in my next project I think.
- rusackas 3y agoSuperset lets you join tables within the same database. If you want to do cross-DB joins, we have a new (beta) in-memory meta-DB that lets you do this, but we generally see and recommend people using things like Trino for this.