Metabase vs. Omni
Whose infrastructure is your data on?

Metabase pricing is on the pricing page — a free open-source edition, Starter and Pro plans you can buy with a card, and Enterprise for larger deployments. Omni doesn't publish pricing; you request a demo and receive a quote based on your user count. Teams who've priced both tell us Metabase comes in well below.

Metabase can be self-hosted — the open-source edition, and Pro and Enterprise plans too — run on Metabase Cloud, or deployed air-gapped on Enterprise. Omni is a hosted cloud service; you can choose which cloud region your instance runs in, but the application runs in Omni's environment. For teams whose data residency or security requirements extend to their analytics tooling, that's usually the deciding factor.

It doesn't have to. Metabase performs in-database analytics — queries are sent to your database and the results come back. Nothing is extracted from your database, and nothing is stored by Metabase unless you choose to. Self-host it and the whole system runs on servers you control, with no third party in the path.

Yes. Data Studio is where you build it: transform raw data into analytics-ready tables, define metrics, and set shared definitions your whole organization queries against. The difference is how you build it — Metabase's is built through the UI with no modeling language to learn, while Omni's is a code-first YAML and git workflow aimed at analytics engineers.

Metabase works on top of the tables dbt builds, and Data Studio lets you model and define metrics on them. Omni goes further here with a two-way sync that writes model changes back into dbt. If your team's entire workflow is centered on dbt and you want to edit dbt models from inside your BI tool, that's a real difference worth weighing.

Metabase, by design — it's what the product was built for. The query builder lets anyone filter, summarize and chart with clicks, and dashboards are built to be drilled into rather than just looked at. Omni's reviewers note that its power comes after the semantic model is set up, and that onboarding non-technical users takes real time and support.

Yes. Explo was acquired by Omni in October 2025 and its customers are migrating — we've talked to several who are weighing their options. If you're weighing that migration, Metabase offers multi-tenant embedded analytics with row- and column-level security, whitelabeling and interactive embeds on Pro — on published pricing, and self-hostable if you'd rather your customers' data didn't leave your infrastructure. Talk to a person and we'll walk through the migration.

When where the software runs is part of your decision, when you want everyone in the company working with data rather than a small analyst team, and when you need to know what it costs before you book a call. Metabase can be self-hosted or air-gapped, publishes its pricing, and offers a free open-source edition.

Credit where it's due. Omni is built by the people who built Looker and the modeling layer is excellent — git-versioned, code-first, with two-way dbt sync and spreadsheet-style workbooks. If your analytics engineers own every definition, your finance team works in Excel formulas against the warehouse, and running on a vendor's infrastructure is fine by your security team, Omni is a strong fit.

It depends on your use case, budget, where your data is allowed to live, and how many people need to work with data. If you're comparing options more broadly, our Metabase Alternatives post lays out how we stack up against Omni, Looker, Tableau, Power BI, Hex, Lightdash and others.

But if you want everyone on your team using it, need to run it on your own infrastructure, and would rather read a price than book a call, try Metabase free.