Why We Prefer Metabase for BI and Reporting

We’ve evaluated a lot of BI tools over the years. From heavyweight enterprise platforms to lightweight dashboarding tools, we’ve tried them all. But the one we keep coming back to, and the one we recommend to our clients, is Metabase.

Here’s why.

Try It Yourself - It’s Open Source

One of the best things about Metabase is that you can just try it. It’s open source, and getting it up and running takes minutes, not days. Spin up a Docker container, point it at a database, and you’ve got a fully functional BI tool ready to explore your data.

The open source edition does have some limitations compared to the paid tiers — you won’t get features like SAML authentication, advanced permissions, or custom branding out of the box. But don’t let that put you off. The open source version is still packed with powerful features: interactive dashboards, custom questions, SQL queries, alerting, and a genuinely intuitive interface. For many teams, it’s more than enough to get real value from their data immediately.

It’s the kind of tool you can evaluate honestly before committing, and that matters.

Metabase Cloud - Enterprise Features Without the Overhead

When our clients need more, Metabase Cloud delivers. The setup is straightforward — no infrastructure to manage, no upgrades to schedule, no servers to patch. You just connect your data sources and start building.

The cloud offering unlocks enterprise features that matter in regulated industries like insurance:

• SAML authentication: Integrate with your existing identity provider for single sign-on, meeting security and compliance requirements without friction
• Enhanced security: Metabase Cloud handles encryption, access controls, and infrastructure hardening so your team doesn’t have to
• Company branding: White-label your dashboards and reports with your own logo and colours, giving stakeholders a polished, professional experience
• Cost effective: You get enterprise-grade BI without the overhead of hosting, managing, and securing your own deployment. For most organisations, this works out significantly cheaper than running it yourself when you factor in the full cost of operations

It’s enterprise BI at a fraction of the complexity and cost.

Dashboards That Just Make Sense

This is where Metabase really shines. The dashboarding experience is outstanding.

Dashboards are smart — filters cascade across cards, drill-through works intuitively, and the layout tools make it easy to build something that looks professional without any design skills. But the real magic is how accessible it is to end users.

Analysts love Metabase because they can navigate data effortlessly. The question builder lets non-technical users create their own reports without writing a line of SQL, while power users can drop into native queries when they need to. It strikes that rare balance between simplicity and capability.

We’ve seen business users who previously relied entirely on spreadsheets start building their own dashboards within hours of getting access. That’s the kind of self-service analytics that actually works in practice, not just in vendor demos.

The Perfect Reporting Layer for Trino

If you’ve read our blog on Trino, you’ll know it’s our go-to query engine for modern data platforms. Metabase and Trino together are a phenomenal combination.

Using the Starburst driver, Metabase connects directly to Trino and gives you all the power of distributed SQL with sub-second reporting. Complex aggregations, multi-dimensional filtering, real-time dashboards — it all just works, and it’s fast.

For our insurance clients, this means analysts can explore claims data, drill into underwriting portfolios, and build exposure reports without waiting. The query performance that Trino delivers, combined with Metabase’s intuitive interface, means teams spend their time analysing data rather than waiting for it.

It’s the reporting platform that Trino deserves.

Always Improving, Always Smooth

One thing that consistently impresses us about Metabase is the pace of development. New features land regularly — improved visualisations, better embedding options, enhanced query capabilities — and the quality is consistently high.

But what really sets Metabase apart is the upgrade experience. Whether you’re running on Metabase Cloud or managing your own deployment on-prem, upgrades just work. Cloud customers get new features automatically. Self-hosted users benefit from a clean, well-documented upgrade process that we’ve never had issues with.

In a world where BI tool upgrades can be a multi-day project involving downtime and regression testing, Metabase’s approach is refreshingly painless.

Why Not the Alternatives?

There are plenty of BI tools out there. Power BI, Tableau, Looker, Superset — they all have their strengths. But Metabase wins for us because:

• Low barrier to entry: Open source means you can evaluate it properly before committing
• User adoption: The interface is intuitive enough that people actually use it, not just the analysts
• Trino integration: First-class support via the Starburst driver makes it the natural choice for our data platform stack
• Cloud simplicity: Enterprise features without enterprise complexity
• Value for money: Competitive pricing that makes sense for organisations of all sizes

Getting Started

The easiest way to see what Metabase can do:

1. Pull the Metabase Docker image and run it locally
2. Connect it to a database you already have
3. Build a dashboard — it’ll take you about ten minutes
4. Show it to your team and watch them start exploring

Or, if you’d rather skip the setup, sign up for a free trial of Metabase Cloud.

Final Thoughts

Metabase has earned its place as our preferred BI platform. It’s open source roots make it easy to evaluate and adopt. The cloud offering delivers enterprise features without the overhead. The dashboards are genuinely excellent. And paired with Trino, it creates a reporting experience that’s fast, intuitive, and powerful.

If you’re looking for a BI tool that your entire organisation will actually use — not just the data team — Metabase is hard to beat.

Looking for a modern reporting platform for your data? We can help you get Metabase up and running on top of Trino and your existing data infrastructure. Get in touch to find out more.