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!