I use and recommend metabase and redash. Metabase is more polished and easier for business folks. But redash supports more data sources (hive for instance).

Both are open source and in my opinion can fill about 80% of dashboards and ad hoc analysis for a small to medium company. The other 20 % your company must be rich enough to buy Tableau or rich enough to build its own solution.

https://www.metabase.com https://redash.io

Not sure what kind of organizations you have seen, but Metabase/Redash would max cover 20-30% of the use and Tableau 80%. It depends a lot on the type of data you have, but anything beyond sql will not work with Metabase or Redash.

I think it depends of the organization. Most companies still use something similar to a DW/DL that speaks SQL, so Metabase/Redash still cover this.

Tableau is awesome, but I believe that most of its features are not used soo often. A simpler tool can provide almost the same or more value than Tableau in some cases. Well, a tool that you don't need to pay expensive licenses for each user makes it more democratic, everyone on the organization can visualize and create new analysis.

But it really doesn't. People will try to do simple calculations as they are used to do in Excel and they will quickly find out they can't do much beyond a simple pivot. Everybody I have see using Tableau is using calculations and a lot of them even LOD calculations. Do this exercise, check what business people really do with Metabase and Resash, I have a feeling they use them to download data into Excel...

I totally agree we need something cheap and simple, but it must have some level of "functional" calculations a la excel. Now if users were exposed a pandas dataframe in Superset or Redash or other, that would be extremely cool and would for some cases be much better than Tableau.

> 7/ Does it support complex time comparisons? No examples, red flag.

Can Metabase do this? I struggled to get a This Year vs Last Year chart without messing with the underlying data.

Is there a good book on Metabase out there?

yes it is, as long as you can represent it in SQL.

for instance, for a query like:

select day_of_year, year, count(*) from orders where year >= 2016 group by day_of_year, year

you can create a line visualization that will display the different years as different lines in about 2 or 3 clicks.

AFAIK, there is no book for Metabase. But the documentation and the project is really straightforward.

+1 for Metabase. I'm currently running a pilot project with it at work, and everyone seems to love it so far. The UI is simple enough that even "common" (as in technophobic) employees feel comfortable using it!

From a capabilities perspective, Tableau and Power BI have everything and the kitchen sink. But they tend to be $$$$ because of licensing costs, paying for extras, and because you need lots and lots of training for devs, analysts, and end users. Oh, and practically Windows only.

There's a new generation of these tools that started web-first. They don't have all the bells and whistles but the learning curve is way lower. So far none have truly stand ahead of the rest but there are some promising ones. But because you almost always need a dev-in-the-loop, almost every company needing a tool like this starts with a DIY open source solution.

Sorry for having to say the "cliche" answer "It depends"...But it really "depends"

It depends on the requirements like 1. requirements for having a self host version or acceptance of having cloud offering 2. data connector requirements (not all products will have native connectors to all data sources) 3. data blending requirements (not all products will have data blending capabilities to the same tune) 4. data size requirements (some support data in MBs, some can support data in PB's) 5. Programming knowledge requirements (some may have only non technical users using the product, some may have technical users who need finer control) 6. Visualisation options 7. Various Reproting options (some may have pdf export option, while some others may not have this) ....and the list is really long

There are a large number of parameters in deciding to choose a BI/Reporting solution

One can probably pickup a particular requirement and evaluate the best in class for that requirement. There is no one solution which excels in every single field.

Tableau has been the leader in the market for long.

And the list of offerings is endless From traditional Tableau, Looker, Sisense, Qlikview to modern POwerBi, Domo, Tableau online, Data Studio, Bime analytics

From open source solutions like redash.io, airbnb superset, pendaho, jasperreports to closed source solutions like crystal reports...

From simple tools like cyfe , to extremely complex ones

From generic solutions to industry specific solutions like Baremetrics (For stripe analysis), and my own ReportDash (for marketing reports)

If you want something that's affordable, yet can serve the full need of what open-source tools can't, do check us out - https://www.holistics.io

We've worked with both small, medium to big tech unicorns. I built the product during my role as data engineer at previous tech startup's employer (we got acquired), so we understood well what are the features desired by SME/startup.