Hosted service price increases led to self-hosting → Self-hosted Kubernetes
“Which let us break out of the constant price increases we faced for hosted versions of these products”
Metabase alternatives: where its users went, and why they left
Metabase (metabase.com) has 31 sourced reports on Friction, drawn from 111 public source threads (as of 2026-10-15), 7 of them describing a move away. This page reads them for one question: if you are leaving Metabase, what do its users say they moved to, and what pushed them out?
Get started free with your email Open Metabase on Friction
Where Metabase users say they went
Switching reports that name a destination. A count is the number of reports naming it, not a market share: Friction only holds what people say in public.
| Named alternative | Reports naming it | Newest report |
|---|---|---|
| Superset (compare) | 4 | 2024 |
| Tableau | 3 | 2019 (over 5 years old) |
| Omni | 2 | 2023 |
| Self-hosted Kubernetes | 1 | 2024 |
| Evidence | 1 | 2023 |
| Insights | 1 | 2020 (over 5 years old) |
| SQL databases | 1 | 2016 (over 5 years old) |
In their words
Poor support and ignored feedback push team to Omni → Omni
“their support has been poor when things do go wrong, with very little willingness to take our feedback into account”
Metabase's resistance to joins led startup to buy Tableau → Tableau
“inevitably you'll want joins, and Metabase is fundamentally opposed to the idea”
Metabase unusable with BigQuery datasets, team moving to Tableau → Tableau
“support big query datasets properly so isn’t really able to be used”
What pushes people away from Metabase
The most-reported open problems, worst severity first. Each links to the item with its source.
Upgrade migration fails when another schema has the same table · Self-hosting & upgrades · Blocks work
“Migration 20260722_rename_query_execution_pkey.yaml returns the following Error:”
JSON unfolding prevents restricted-column metadata from syncing · Permissions & security · Blocks work
“field sync for that whole table is skipped. None of its hidden columns are ever retired”
Dashboard-filter click behavior overrides other table columns · UI & usability · Blocks work
“all columns are affected by that click behavior even if they are not configured with click behavior”
MCP query tools reject valid portable foreign-key queries · API & developer experience · Blocks work
“The MCP `construct_query` and `query` tools reject every request with:”
Dashboard auto-refresh causes browser memory to grow until a crash · Reliability & bugs · Blocks work
“the tab that has the dashboard open has constantly escalating memory usage until either the tab or browser crashes”
See all 31 themes for Metabase
Other business intelligence tools on Friction, and what their users struggle with
Switching trades one set of problems for another. The same evidence, for each tool Friction covers in this category:
Apache Superset
15 reports · 82 source threads · most-discussed area: Reliability & bugs
- Float columns cannot be used to create histogram charts
- Postgres schema named pgsql is missing from datasets
- Handlebars chart CSS appears as plain text
Metabase vs Apache Superset: side by side · Apache Superset alternatives
Counts and reports reflect people who post in public (developers and technical buyers are over-represented). A tool with fewer reports is not a better tool; it may only be discussed less. How the data is built.