Metabase helps Floryn simplify their BI, reduce costs, and empower teams to explore data easily.

The Challenge: Floryn’s team was using Looker, but they faced challenges with a lack of updates and active development. They needed a more efficient, cost-effective BI solution to streamline their analytics stack, with simplified reporting and better data visualization capabilities.

The Solution: After evaluating multiple BI tools, Floryn switched to Metabase for its clean visualizations, user-friendliness, and clear roadmap. They now use dbt to model data and Metabase solely for visualization—eliminating the need to work across multiple layers, which was required in Looker.

The Results: Metabase has greatly reduced the cost of BI for Floryn, providing a better solution at ⅓ of the cost of their previous tool. The team enjoys the self-service nature of Metabase, which lets users generate their own queries without requiring SQL knowledge.

"Metabase costs us roughly ⅓ of the cost of our previous BI tool while simultaneously offering better visualizations and easier use "

Tijs Bronnenberg
Business Analyst at Floryn

Why Metabase?

Floryn came across Metabase in a Hacker News discussion. They had been using Looker but decided to switch due to a lack of product updates. After evaluating several BI tools, they chose Metabase for its clean visualizations, broad features, and transparent roadmap. The switch helped simplify their analytics stack. With Looker, they worked across two layers—LookML and dbt. With Metabase, they’ve eliminated this extra step by using dbt for data modeling and Metabase for visualization.

The data

Floryn analyzes various types of data to support their operations:

• Marketing Dashboards: Track application metrics, including lead volume, source tracking, and campaign performance.
• Sales & Underwriting Dashboards: Focus on the sales funnel to optimize conversion and underwriting processes.
• Credit Risk Dashboards: Track customers’ financial health after approval.
• KPI Reporting: Metabase helps report key performance indicators to external stakeholders.

Their stack includes dbt, Metabase, Deepnote, Fivetran, and PostgreSQL.

How the Floryn team uses Metabase

Metabase is available to everyone at Floryn, and the team focuses on minimizing SQL-based queries by using the Graphical Query Builder. This allows non-technical users to easily explore data and create visualizations without needing SQL skills.

One feature that stood out to Floryn was the ability to join tables directly in Metabase, without the need to predefine joins like they did in Looker with LookML. This helps users quickly pull data together and ask questions.

Floryn uses Metabase for various internal reports and dashboards. The DataOps team, including analysts and engineers, are the primary users, but the Sales team also relies heavily on it. Everyone at Floryn can ask questions and create their own visualizations, giving teams more autonomy over their data.

Floryn also displays key dashboards on TVs throughout the office to keep everyone updated. For example, they show Credit Risk data in the Risk team’s area, making sure they have real-time access to important metrics.

The results

Metabase has reduced Floryn’s BI costs to about a third of what they were paying with Looker. It has also provided better visualizations and a more user-friendly experience. The team values the self-service nature of Metabase, allowing users to create their own queries without needing SQL skills.

This has increased data curiosity across the company, with more teams using Metabase to explore and interact with data on their own. The ease of use and flexibility of Metabase have made it an essential tool, helping Floryn become more data-driven and efficient.