Metabase is a powerful, open-source business intelligence platform that makes it easy to ask questions about your data and display the answers in clear, interactive dashboards. We use Metabase because it offers enterprise-grade BI capabilities without the per-user licensing fees of tools like Power BI or Tableau. It is self-hosted on infrastructure we control, so your data never leaves your environment. And it is intuitive enough that non-technical users can build their own reports without learning SQL.

Power BI Pro costs around £7.50 per user per month, and Tableau can cost significantly more. At scale, these per-user fees add up quickly. Metabase has no per-user licensing fees — whether you have 10 users or 500, the platform cost stays the same. You pay for our managed service to deploy, maintain, and support the platform, plus the infrastructure costs. For most businesses, this works out significantly cheaper than commercial alternatives, especially as user counts grow.

Yes. Metabase includes a visual query builder that lets users create charts, tables, and dashboards without writing any code or SQL. Users can click through data tables, apply filters, create calculations, and save their own reports. For power users who want more control, there is also a full SQL editor.

Metabase connects to virtually any SQL database — PostgreSQL, MySQL, SQL Server, MariaDB, SQLite, and more. We can also connect to cloud data warehouses like BigQuery and Redshift. For data that lives in spreadsheets or SaaS tools, we set up ETL pipelines to bring that data into a structured database that Metabase can query.

Yes. Metabase is self-hosted on infrastructure we manage — your data is never sent to a third-party BI vendor's cloud. We implement role-based access controls so users only see the data they are authorised to access. All connections use encrypted transport, and the platform is backed up and monitored 24/7 as part of our managed service.