# Metabase

16 Hacker News commenters recommended Metabase and 10 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 8 of 13 months.

**Verdict:** People recommend it for turning messy databases into stakeholder dashboards quickly. Critics find it clunky for deep UX, permissions and embedding, and cite a 2026 zero-day hack.

## Why people recommend it

- Simple dashboards for stakeholders (2 comments): "It's great for internal dashboards and quick customer access, but starts to feel clunky once you care about UX, permissions, and embedding deeply." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46947542)) "if all you care about is showing data in a digestible format to stakeholders, it's really simple" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48049638))
- Works well for many people (2 comments): "This setup works very well at the moment for me." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49488799)) "We use metabase (and generally love it)" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46336418))
- Works with Claude and CLI (2 comments): "we're pretty happy with Claude plus Metabase CLI (self-hosted)" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50268621)) "i have a metabase skill to query analytics" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46336145))

## What people warn about

- Hacked by zero-day vulnerability (4 comments): "their metabase instance was hacked with a zero-day" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49606156)) "It's just a hack, it happens, we fixed the hole, nothing to see here until we find the next buyer" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49255481)) "Metabase Cloud was attacked by someone utilizing an unknown ("0-day") security vulnerability" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49203336))
- Clunky UX, permissions, embedding (2 comments): "It's great for internal dashboards and quick customer access, but starts to feel clunky once you care about UX, permissions, and embedding deeply." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46947542)) "without the clunkiness of Metabase" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46991391))
- Poor code quality, bad SQL output (2 comments): "Apparently the AI company Metabase has a very poor code base." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48147884)) "I've seen the SQL Metabase emits, it's not great." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46819887))

## Alternatives hackers recommend

- [Microsoft Power BI](https://hackerapproved.com/p/power-bi.md): 9 recommend
- [Tableau](https://hackerapproved.com/p/tableau.md): 7 recommend
- [BitBoard](https://hackerapproved.com/p/bitboard.md): 7 recommend

## Where to get it

- [Visit the official site](https://www.metabase.com/)

## Cite as

Hacker Approved, "Metabase", https://hackerapproved.com/p/metabase/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).