Metabase
Metabase is an outstanding dashboard tool that deserves far more recognition than it currently receives. Its user-friendly design and seamless setup process make it an ideal choice, particularly for non-technical users who might otherwise struggle with more complex analytics platforms.
One of Metabase’s greatest strengths is its ability to deliver a robust suite of features straight out of the box, all at a highly affordable price point. Whether you are just beginning your journey into analytics or managing a small team, Metabase offers the perfect combination of simplicity, power, and cost-effectiveness.
Features
Considering metabase’s price point, what you get out of the box is solid, the features they do have are typically very robust. While it might not offer more advanced or customisation, their features are more than suitable for most businesses. 7/10
Cost
Metabase’s free and lower-cost paid versions make it a more affordable option for small to medium-sized teams. However, as your team grows, the costs for the paid versions may increase, especially when scaling for larger organisations. 8/10
Scalability
Metabase scales well for small to mid-sized teams especially when data modelling is handled externally (e.g., with dbt). However, it has limitations with large concurrent user bases, high interactivity requirements, and complex scenarios. 7/10
Ease Of Use
Metabase is highly user-friendly, especially for non-technical users, with an intuitive UI and tools to build dashboards without SQL. It’s easy to get started, but challenges can arise from poorly structured data models or advanced needs. 9/10
Sharing
Dashboards and single charts can be scheduled and shared with colleagues, embedded into websites and applications, downloaded as PDFs, sent via email, integrated with slack and more. 10/10
Teamwork
Metabase supports basic teamwork through features like shared dashboards, alerts, but falls short on real-time collaboration, annotations, and advanced user interactivity. It’s best suited for environments with clear data workflows and less reliance on integrated team discussions. 6/10
Community
While their official documentation is detailed and covers the basics well, advanced or edge-case scenarios are less thoroughly addressed, leaving users to find solutions independently. 7/10
Security
Metabase provides essential security features such as RBAC, row-level security, SSO and data encryption mechanisms. lacks fine-grained permissions, advanced logging, or integration with identity management solutions. 7/10
Governance
Limited governance features, with no native support for version control or advanced permissions. Although the paid plan contains Official Collections and Verified Items to ensure data is checked by relevant users. 5/10
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Key Advice
Modelling: Whilst Metabase offers some basic data manipulation, it simply can’t handle more complex transformations and this is often the root cause of slow-loading dashboards. Use tools like dot for modelling and save metabase for visualisations.
Style: One of the great things about Metabase vs other tools is that it has an inherent look and feel which means that all dashboards created look similar, the spacing is the same etc. This is not always the case with other visualisation tools where this needs to be set up by the user. As such you can very quickly get a great looking dashboard, but this does mean that where you are looking for something highly customised, Metabase may not be the best choice.
Data Governance: The current data pipeline lacks a structured approach for securely sharing benchmarking insights, while also protecting access to sensitive private company information.
Fragmented Solution: Although some data sources are centralised, the process is not automated to capture the latest updates. Additionally, the codebase for merging this data is error-prone, lacks structure, and does not follow best practices, making maintenance and scaling challenging.
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Cost-Effective Data Stack: We proposed and implemented a composable data pipeline that leverages the most scalable and cost-effective tools for each data function. This pipeline, which refreshes data daily and supports self-service across teams and the CFO network, operates at under $100 per month.
Centralised Data Models: Data from all systems is centralised and modelled according to a structured set of data definitions documented in FCC’s data dictionary, ensuring consistency and accuracy.
Automated Insights: We developed interactive, user-friendly dashboards for both the investment team and the CFO Circle, providing insights at the company level and benchmarking metrics against industry peers.
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