The best BI & dashboards
Every option ranked — open-source, self-hostable, and commercial — by our transparent Sovereignty Score, with honest trade-offs so you choose what fits you, not us.
Charts on top of the warehouse. Priced per viewer, which means the cost of letting people see a number rises with how many people you want to see it.
L5Applications — layer 5 of the AI stack- 1
Metabase
Top pickOpen sourceThe one non-technical colleagues actually use without training.
Open-source edition free and self-hostable. Cloud and enterprise tiers are paid. · in our Tableau comparison →
What is Metabase? →88sovereignty - 2
Evidence
Open sourceDashboards as Markdown and SQL, versioned in Git.
Free and open source. Evidence Cloud is an optional paid hosted tier. · in our Tableau comparison →
What is Evidence? →94sovereignty - 3
Apache Superset
Open sourceEnterprise BI under Apache Software Foundation governance.
Free and open source. Managed offerings available from Preset and others. · in our Tableau comparison →
What is Apache Superset? →93sovereignty - 4
Lightdash
Open sourceBI that reads your dbt models, so metrics are defined once.
Open-source core free and self-hostable. Lightdash Cloud is paid. · in our Tableau comparison →
What is Lightdash? →87sovereignty - 5
Microsoft Power BI
CommercialA fifth of Tableau's per-seat price, if you are already on Microsoft.
Power BI Pro about $14/user/month; Premium and Fabric capacity considerably more. Checked 2026-08-04. · in our Tableau comparison →
What is Microsoft Power BI? →28sovereignty
Is it free?
The free tier, its real limits and where you start paying — read from each vendor's own pricing page and dated.
Run these yourself
What each one actually needs — real RAM, honest running cost, and the setup time nobody quotes.
- Self-hosting Metabase 2 GB for Metabase, which Metabase says is 'more than enough' for solo users or small teams, plus 2 GB for its PostgreSQL application database
- Self-hosting Apache Superset 8 GB with 2 vCPU, the community figure the Superset FAQ cites. The FAQ says needs grow with concurrent users and their activity, not with data size
Replacing a specific tool?
Head-to-head comparisons for each popular bi & dashboards product.
Straight head-to-heads
Two bi & dashboards tools, side by side — verified facts and a plain verdict.