Metabase
The most recommended of 4 business intelligence tools
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.
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.
26 people gave an opinion
- recommend it
- 16
- criticize it
- 10
- approval share
- 62%
Recommended in 8 of 13 months
- November 2025: not recommended
- December 2025: recommended
- January 2026: recommended
- February 2026: recommended
- March 2026: not recommended
- April 2026: recommended
- May 2026: recommended
- June 2026: not recommended
- July 2026: not recommended
- August 2026: recommended
- September 2026: recommended
- October 2026: recommended
- November 2026: not recommended (month in progress)
Why it doesn’t carry the badge
- 16 people recommend itNeeds 10 or more, met.
- 1.6 recommenders for every criticNeeds 2 to 1 or better, not met.
- Recommended in 8 of 13 monthsNeeds 4 or more, met.
The same three rules apply to every product, and the badge can’t be bought. How the badge works
What people say about it
The reasons people give, with the number of comments that give each one. Open a reason to read what they said.
Why people recommend it
Each mark is one comment
Simple dashboards for stakeholders
“It's great for internal dashboards and quick customer access, but starts to feel clunky once you care about UX, permissions, and embedding deeply.”
Comment from 9 Feb 2026 in “What do you use for your customer facing analytics?” “if all you care about is showing data in a digestible format to stakeholders, it's really simple”
Comment from 7 May 2026 in “SQLite Is a Library of Congress Recommended Storage Format” Works well for many people
“This setup works very well at the moment for me.”
Comment from 29 Aug 2026 in “Ask HN: Why do we need MCP?” “We use metabase (and generally love it)”
Comment from 20 Dec 2025 in “Skills Officially Comes to Codex” Works with Claude and CLI
“we're pretty happy with Claude plus Metabase CLI (self-hosted)”
Comment from 28 Oct 2026 in “Hex Raises $100M” “i have a metabase skill to query analytics”
Comment from 20 Dec 2025 in “Skills Officially Comes to Codex”
What people warn about
Each mark is one comment
Hacked by zero-day vulnerability
“their metabase instance was hacked with a zero-day”
Comment from 8 Sep 2026 in “We have a year to fix security everywhere” “It's just a hack, it happens, we fixed the hole, nothing to see here until we find the next buyer”
Comment from 11 Aug 2026 in “The UK's War on Anonymity Has Come to America” “Metabase Cloud was attacked by someone utilizing an unknown ("0-day") security vulnerability”
Comment from 6 Aug 2026 in “Metabase: Unauthenticated SQL injection in password reset (CVSS 10.0)” - Comment from 7 Aug 2026 in “Framework discloses data breach via Metabase 0-day”
Clunky UX, permissions, embedding
“It's great for internal dashboards and quick customer access, but starts to feel clunky once you care about UX, permissions, and embedding deeply.”
Comment from 9 Feb 2026 in “What do you use for your customer facing analytics?” “without the clunkiness of Metabase”
Comment from 12 Feb 2026 in “What do you use for your customer facing analytics?” Poor code quality, bad SQL output
“Apparently the AI company Metabase has a very poor code base.”
Comment from 15 May 2026 in “Welcome to the Strip Mining Era of OSS Security” “I've seen the SQL Metabase emits, it's not great.”
Comment from 30 Jan 2026 in “Deep dive into Turso, the "SQLite rewrite in Rust"”
Other business intelligence tools people recommend
The three most recommended other business intelligence tools, with the same counts for each, so you can compare like for like. The tick on each bar marks the 2 to 1 line the badge needs.
| Product | Recommend | Criticize | Approval | Months | Owned | Badge |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| MetabaseThis page | 16 | 10 | 62% | 8 | — | — |
| Microsoft Power BI | 9 | 10 | 47% | 6 | — | — |
| Tableau | 7 | 12 | 37% | 5 | — | — |
| BitBoard | 7 | 0 | 100% | 1 | — | — |
What people said
23 of the 26 comments that mention it, newest first. Each links to the original comment.
“we're pretty happy with Claude plus Metabase CLI (self-hosted)”
“the cloud / self hosted divide was too much fiddling, along with the expression language”
“One is Metabase, which is written in Clojure”
“their metabase instance was hacked with a zero-day”
“This setup works very well at the moment for me.”
“It's just a hack, it happens, we fixed the hole, nothing to see here until we find the next buyer”
“I'd also like to see them pursue legal action against Metabase.”
“You can self host it and not allow accessing it over the internet.”
“we are sending this email to you regardless”
“Last 0day was catastrophic.”
“Metabase Cloud was attacked by someone utilizing an unknown ("0-day") security vulnerability”
“Metabase is not going to get meaningful investment from researchers who want to fix issues”
“Apparently the AI company Metabase has a very poor code base.”
“if all you care about is showing data in a digestible format to stakeholders, it's really simple”
“Metabase works great with DuckDB as well”
“without the clunkiness of Metabase”
“It's great for internal dashboards and quick customer access, but starts to feel clunky once you care about UX, permissions, and embedding deeply.”
“I've seen the SQL Metabase emits, it's not great.”
“metabase is intended for business analyst types and is AGPL, with shenanigans for embedding”
“First you use Metabase to turn the mess into something you can stand behind”
“lets anyone in your company rummage around in the databases you have”
“We use metabase (and generally love it)”
“i have a metabase skill to query analytics”
Counts come from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026. How we count. Report a mistake.