Metabase vs Microsoft Power BI comparison

Metabase and Microsoft are both solutions in the BI (Business Intelligence) Tools category. Metabase is ranked #24 with an average rating of 7.7, while Microsoft is ranked #1 with an average rating of 8.0. Metabase holds a 1.1% mindshare in BIT, compared to Microsoft’s 14.1% mindshare. Additionally, 100% of Metabase users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 93% of Microsoft users who would recommend it.

Metabase

Read 4 Metabase reviews

730 Views
730 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

Microsoft Power BI

Read 326 Microsoft Power BI reviews

22,361 Views
13,864 Comparison Views

93% willing to recommend

Metabase

Microsoft Power BI

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 1, 2025

Microsoft Power BI and Metabase compete in the business intelligence space. Power BI has an advantage in integration capabilities and analytics, while Metabase offers simplicity and cost-effectiveness.

Features: Microsoft Power BI offers seamless integration with Microsoft products, advanced AI-powered analytics, and comprehensive data visualization tools. Metabase is user-friendly with an easy query builder and supports multiple databases with minimal configuration.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Microsoft Power BI requires complex deployment but has extensive support. Metabase is easier to deploy for smaller teams with community-driven support.

Pricing and ROI: Power BI requires a subscription, increasing with advanced plans; it offers high ROI for advanced needs. Metabase has minimal setup costs due to its open-source model, appealing to budget-conscious teams.

To learn more, read our detailed Metabase vs. Microsoft Power BI Report (Updated: September 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Metabase vs. Microsoft Power BI

September 2025

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Helped 868,787 peers since 2012

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Categories and Ranking

Metabase

Ranking in BI (Business Intelligence) Tools

24th

Average Rating

7.6

Reviews Sentiment

7.3

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Microsoft Power BI

Ranking in BI (Business Intelligence) Tools

1st

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

7.2

Number of Reviews

326

Ranking in other categories

Reporting (1st)

Mindshare comparison

As of October 2025, in the BI (Business Intelligence) Tools category, the mindshare of Metabase is 1.1%, up from 0.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Microsoft Power BI is 14.1%, down from 21.7% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

BI (Business Intelligence) Tools Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
Microsoft Power BI	14.1%
Metabase	1.1%
Other	84.8%

BI (Business Intelligence) Tools

Featured Reviews

Ibrahim Izz El-Deen

Data Engineer at USYTech

Modern analytics tool enhances user interactions with neat visualizations for improved decision-making

One area for improvement could be in offering more advanced features even in the open-source edition or making the paid versions more cost-effective. Data scalability, especially if the data grows, requires manual infrastructure management, which could be improved. Increased customization and visualization options in the open-source edition would be beneficial. Additionally, it might be helpful if more complex queries and stored procedures were supported.

Read full review

Shoury Priyanshu

Senior Manager, Strategy & Consulting at Viacom18 Media Pvt Ltd

Facilitates seamless data aggregation with some outdated visual elements hindering user appeal

Real-time data integration is an area for improvement. Although I've worked on several solutions involving real-time integration, it's not very user-friendly and often lags, especially with over a million data rows. This makes Power BI difficult to manage as loading times can reach one or two minutes, which is problematic today. There are challenges with scalability, requiring multiple pages in dashboards to manage these issues. Visualization could be improved as it appears outdated. Users, especially newcomers, find it unappealing and not user-friendly.

Read full review

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Pros

"Metabase's key advantage is its modern approach to business intelligence."

"The most valuable feature of the solution is its interface, which is used to query data into Metabase. I think it is very useful and handy for a novice."

"It is easy for a new user to learn the tool."

"I rate the solution’s stability a nine out of ten."

"The most valuable feature would be the abundance of connectors. It is also easy to use."

"It has greatly improved our reporting capabilities."

"I liked that Microsoft Power BI handles a large amount of data. I can handle hundreds of rows from Postgres in a few minutes. I also like how it detects the relationship between the tables without explicitly saying that. It just detects the relationship automatically. That made it easier to work with the data."

"Premium features that used to cost $5,000 per company per month recently became a lot more accessible. Microsoft recently implemented a per user feature in Power BI Premium; it's $20 per month."

"The solution is very intuitive, you do not need to have too much programming knowledge to use it. Advanced Excel users can use it very easily."

"Power BI's integration with other tools is very good."

"We can see that it's really improved the way end users can do their own graphs and pick their own fields of information and present that in a nice way."

"The dashboard is very nice and it is very simple to understand every single component."

More Microsoft Power BI pros

Cons

"The solution could provide more customization."

"The tool must be made more user-friendly."

"One area for improvement could be in offering more advanced features even in the open-source edition or making the paid versions more cost-effective."

"I think there is a need to add a few more advanced visuals in the tool. There are a standard set of visuals in the tool which are available."

"I believe the price should be degressive, and we should have a lower, or better unit price if we have more users."

"They can provide a user-friendly and easy way to use this tool for people who don't know about programming or technical things. It will be quite good if they can improve the look and feel and make it simpler to operate. They can make it easier to create some of the reports. They can also include predefined templates that you can directly use."

"Microsoft BI comes under pressure when there is a lot of data to be crunched. It gets slower and slower, and the functionality becomes a bit of a problem. The performance goes down with data being fed into the system. The infrastructure requirement also increases if you have to increase the performance. This is the area that can be improved in my opinion. Initially, the product is good, but over the years, when data gets accumulated, it becomes a problem unless the old data is kind of archived and is no longer shown on the visualization. It has a feature by using which a user can query for a report through simple questions to a bot. So, if I want to look for the customer share of revenue by geography, I just simply state that in the chatbot. If I wanted it in a pie chart, then you say, "Please show it to me in a pie chart." It comes out well for basic charts. This feature should be improvised more so that people can very quickly get customized reports on the go."

"If I compare it to Tableau, I'd say the visualizations can be better. We should have multiple options. By that I mean, while there are multiple options for the visualization, the look and feel of the dashboard when you compare to Tableau is on the lower side. Tableau has a much better visualization."

"We face multiple issues, and the connection drops off multiple times while integrating Microsoft Power BI with OAC and pulling in the data."

"There is no specific area that I have a problem with. It's just that, with whatever feature you come across, every visual has its own formatting and behavior. What you get in one visual for a feature, you don't seem to get in another."

"The handling of the workspaces can be made more granular for user access rights. It can be managed a little bit better in terms of the connection to Active Directory so that we have more granular access rights. I am not sure if this is really possible or if we can solve it differently, but we need a lot of workspaces, and we are not sure how we can deal with it from the access rights perspective."

"The product could have better analytics capabilities."

More Microsoft Power BI cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"I would not say it is a cheap tool, but it's viable."

"Using the open-source edition of Metabase on AWS EC2 cost us around $29 per month for the EC2 instance, which was affordable."

"The product is open-sourced."

"No comment on pricing."

"We have enterprise licenses and some of the other tools or features come as a package and others you have to purchase separately."

"I rate the product price an eight on a scale of one to ten, where one is low price and ten is high price."

"Pricing, that's where Microsoft beats Tableau. It is priced much cheaper."

"I would advise that Microsoft BI products are rightly priced and the licensing is easy to follow and to fulfill."

"We are end-users, and we don't take care of the prices and accounting. We get a product and pay the fee to our internal service provider, but its price should be reasonable. Otherwise, they wouldn't have bought it."

"Microsoft BI for desktop is free to use, and you can download and use it."

"The Report Server is pretty expensive on-premise. But as long companies are happy to use the cloud version, that's very cost effective."

More Microsoft Power BI pricing and cost advice

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Comparison Review

it_user79932

Senior Manager - BI Head at NVidia

Feb 4, 2015

Comparison of SAP BO, Tableau, QlikView, Cognos, Microsoft, OBIEE and Pentaho

1. SAP BO/BI Enterprise scalability Security Ease of use Semantic layer 2. Tableau Visualization Data discovery Turnaround time 3. IBM Cognos Enterprise scalability Security In-memory feature 4. MS BI - Flexibility 5. Pentaho - Open source but still enterprise grade 6. QlikView Data…

Read full review

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

16%

Comms Service Provider

14%

Financial Services Firm

10%

Outsourcing Company

Financial Services Firm

12%

Computer Software Company

Manufacturing Company

Government

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

No data available

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	134
Midsize Enterprise	57
Large Enterprise	165

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Metabase?

Using the open-source edition of Metabase on AWS EC2 cost us around $29 per month for the EC2 instance, which was affordable.

See all answers

What needs improvement with Metabase?

See all answers

What is your primary use case for Metabase?

I used Metabase for business intelligence and analytics in my organization. We connected Metabase to AWS Athena, allowing us to query and visualize data stored in S3 buckets.

See all answers

Seeking lightweight open source BI software

There are many...It would rather depend what System BI architecture or Enterprise legacy you have at your end...I would recommend as follows: 1) If you have legacies of SAP, Oracle - look for SAP...

See all answers

Is Power BI a complete platform or only a visualization tool?

Power BI is an advanced visualization tool oriented to big data with a very complete set of widgets to visualize information, control users accessing information, the configuration of governance po...

See all answers

How does Oracle OBIEE compare with Microsoft BI?

Oracle OBIEE is great in allowing design and creativity per the individual needs of the organization. Dashboards are fully customizable and very user-friendly. This solution is very stable. Oracle ...

See all answers

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Databox vs Metabase

Compared 5% of the time

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Compared 7% of the time

Domo vs Microsoft Power BI

Compared 5% of the time

KNIME Business Hub vs Microsoft Power BI

Compared 4% of the time

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Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

BI (Business Intelligence) Tools

September 2025

Download Metabase product report

Buyer's Guide

Microsoft Power BI

September 2025

Download Microsoft Power BI product report

Also Known As

No data available

SSRS, SSAS, MSBI, MS Reporting Services, Microsoft BI Tools, Microsoft Big Data, Power BI Pro, MS BI

Overview

Metabase is a business intelligence tool designed for analyzing data with ease. It's known for its straightforward setup, making data visualization and exploration accessible to teams without coding expertise.

Metabase simplifies the process of deriving insights from data. It allows users to pose questions and instantly view results in the form of tables or charts. Its open-source nature offers flexibility for customization, paired with a clean and intuitive dashboard providing an efficient way to manage and share data insights. Users appreciate its ability to connect with multiple databases, enabling seamless data integration and analysis across platforms.

What are the valuable features?

Ad-hoc Querying: Enables non-technical users to create complex queries visually.
Dashboard Sharing: Facilitates easy sharing of insights through customizable dashboards.
Data Visualization: Supports various chart types for better data interpretation.
Open Source: Offers the flexibility to tailor features to specific business requirements.
Database Connectivity: Connects with numerous data sources to unify data analysis.

What are the benefits and ROI?

Cost Efficiency: Lowers costs by eliminating the need for costly proprietary solutions.
Increased Productivity: Saves time with easy setup and quick data interpretation.
Improved Decision-Making: Access to actionable insights enhances strategic decisions.
Flexibility: Customizable to meet evolving business data analysis needs.

Metabase implementation varies across industries such as tech, e-commerce, and healthcare, allowing firms to leverage analytics for performance optimization. Companies in tech appreciate seamless integration with SQL databases, while e-commerce benefits from sales trend analysis. Healthcare utilizes Metabase for patient data evaluation, aiding in informed healthcare service decisions.

Metabase

Microsoft Power BI is a powerful tool for data analysis and visualization. This tool stands out for its ability to merge and analyze data from various sources. Widely adopted across different industries and departments, Power BI is instrumental in creating visually appealing dashboards and generating insightful business intelligence reports. Its intuitive interface, robust visualization capabilities, and seamless integration with other Microsoft applications empower users to easily create interactive reports and gain valuable insights.

Microsoft

Sample Customers

Information Not Available

Accenture Adidas Aetna AIG Airbus Alibaba Allstate Amazon American Express Aon AT&T Audi Bank of America BASF Bayer Berkshire Hathaway Boeing Coca-Cola Comcast Cisco Coca-Cola Dell Disney Emirates Equinix FedEx Ford GE Google H&M Home Depot Honda IBM Intel JPMorgan Chase Kellogg's Kroger L'Oréal McDonald's Merck MetLife Microsoft Nike Oracle P&G PepsiCo Procter & Gamble Prudential Financial SAP Siemens Snapchat Spotify Starbucks Target Toyota T-Mobile Unilever Visa Walmart WeWork World Bank Xerox

Buyer's Guide

Metabase vs. Microsoft Power BI

September 2025

Free Report: Metabase vs. Microsoft Power BI

Find out what your peers are saying about Metabase vs. Microsoft Power BI and other solutions. Updated: September 2025.

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