Metabase vs. SisenseHow to choose embedded analytics for your app?
Metabase is the easy-to-use business intelligence tool with a friendly UX that lets everyone in your team work with data.
Trusted by over 60,000 companies
What's the difference between Metabase and Sisense?
TL;DR - Metabase gets embedded interactive analytics up and running faster than you can figure out how much Sisense costs (even roughly). With no solid pricing indication on their website, we’re going off what Reddit says, which is that it’ll cost you a chunk of change an order of magnitude (approx.) larger than the cost of running Metabase. Sisense has a steeper learning curve than Metabase. Metabase lets everyone - even non-technical or data-savvy people - query data with or without SQL.
What makes Metabase a good choice compared to Sisense?
- Interactive, customer-facing analytics in days, not sprints. Customizable embedded analytics that lets your customers explore their data with as much - or as little - flexibility as you want.
- Super fast setup with integration to your preferred data tools. Get to proof of concept for embedded analytics really quickly with minimal technical overhead.
- Easy for everyone to use. With intuitive tools like interactive dashboards with quick drill-through analyses, the query builder to write questions without SQL, and one-click-to-create charts.
- Open source and affordable. Transparent pricing for startups through to advanced functionality and support for Enterprise. Secure and scalable, with no limits on the size of your dataset.
- Your choice of deployment. Host it yourself on-prem, or let us do the work for you. Metabase Cloud can be hosted in your region at no extra cost on Pro or Enterprise plans.
- Help from our world-class Success team. Fast, direct help from technical experts, no intermediate support agents. Customers love them.
- Private and secure. We never look at or copy your data. And we prioritize privacy and security features to secure data access in your org, like SSO and fine-grained permissions.
When might Sisense be a better fit than Metabase?*
- You’re an enterprise-level company working with large, complex data sets, that you need to blend and embed in your app.
- You’ve got a pretty big budget. Their ‘no surprises’ pricing model may, in fact, have some surprises with usage-based pricing impacted by large databases and high concurrency.
- You’ve got a technical team to set up and maintain ElastiCubes.
- You only want some people querying your data. Sisense has a steep learning curve for advanced features.
- You’re looking for a high-touch sales cycle.
- You’ve got time to learn how to use it and get to proof of concept for your embedded analytics set up.
*For the record... Metabase supports a number of happy enterprise-level customers for all their customer-facing embedded analytics and internal-facing BI needs.(We’re trying to present a somewhat balanced view here, but c’mon, it’s still our website 😏)
“Metabase was the embedded solution we were looking for - easy-to-integrate, customizable and performant.”
Co-founder, Sincera
Frequently asked questions
Metabase is best suited for businesses that need a straightforward embedded analytics solution that lets businesses integrate customer-facing analytics in apps without the heavy lifting of a proprietary build, or expense of other embedded analytics tools. It lets everyone in and outside of your company self-serve analytics without having to rely too heavily on your data team. It's BI that people will actually enjoy using, at the right price for your scale.
Credit where it’s due - Sisense may be a good fit for larger enterprises or orgs with more extensive data analysis and customization needs, deep pockets, and a lower need for everyone in the org to be able to jump in and run their own reports. It’s got a lot of bells and whistles - and depending on the maturity of your org, your use case and needs, it may be more than you need.
Metabase is trusted by over 50,000 companies with their analytics, from startups who need their first business intelligence tool through to Enterprises. Metabase open source is the go-to choice for founders and solo-developers to embed analytics in their platforms to let people get answers from data on their own. Metabase Pro and Enterprise is generally chosen by CTOs, CPOs, Heads of Data who have been there, done that with every other BI tool on the market and need a way to make self-service analytics actually happen.
Metabase offers customer-facing embedded analytics as well as internal-facing analytics for companies. Sisense is geared primarily towards embedding.
Metabase is ideal for quick, intuitive data exploration that lets people in your company click around in interactive dashboard and visualizations to learn from data, or create queries with or without SQL.
Sisense may be better suited for complex data analysis and putting detailed visualizations in front of customers.
Metabase is open source with affordable plans available for additional security and governance features, cloud deployment, and fast, unlimited technical help from engineers.
Sisense's pricing is generally higher - from what we can tell; it's pretty opaque.
Metabase and Sisense both let data analysts work in SQL; and less technically savvy people ask questions without SQL. Metabase's intuitive Query Builder lets non-technical or data savvy people put together analyses with clicks - no SQL necessary. Analysts and data people who prefer to write SQL can fill their boots in the SQL editor.
Metabase and Sisense give people a way to visualize their data and make sense of the numbers. But Metabase is so much more than just a visualization tool. For people who feel like they’re seeing double when staring at columns, it’s an intuitive way to filter and summarize to uncover trends and get insights to make data-driven decisions.
There’s no right or wrong answer here. It will generally depend on your use case, how much you want people to be able to learn from data and run reports on their own without depending on your data team; your preferred data stack, how fast you need to get up and running, your budget, and more.
Again, there’s no “right” answer, but just sayin’ - Metabase will let everyone work with data, integrates with your preferred data tools, gets up and running in 5 minutes flat, and suits all budgets (and you can try it for free).