How’s 2018 been for you so far? Good we hope. It’s certainly been busy here at the proverbial Meta base, and as such we’ve got either an extremely early Valentine’s Day or an extremely late holiday gift for you. What we know for certain is we named it Metabase 0.28, and we think you’ll get along well with it.

Text with your dashboards

While a chart can say a lot, sometimes it needs a little help. That’s where you come in because you can now add text cards to dashboards. Use them to help explain a metric, organize a set of visualizations with a title, or explain why the numbers are down because the cat walked over the keyboard again. Since the cards are Markdown-based you can include links, pictures (or GIFs), bullet points — really anything you need to give the right context alongside your data.

Pulse attachments

We know a bunch of you have workflows that require getting a table out of Metabase and into the hands of your team on a regular basis. Pulses now have your back. For any question you add to a pulse you can now attach the full result as a CSV or XLS file.

Multi-select dashboard filters

Ever needed to filter a dashboard by a specific state, for example, but wanted to include more than one state in that filter? Well, now you can. I guess you could say we’ve checked that box.

Current period in time filters

In the past, to prevent showing partial data, when you’ve filtered data in Metabase by time using our query builder we’ve not included the current day, week, etc. But since that’s not always what you want, we added the option to include the current period if you need that in your charts or tables.

Performance improvements

As we’ve added new features over the past few years we’ve noticed and heard from you all that we’ve incurred some performance debt. We decided to pay some of that back this release by optimizing the sync process and API calls to use less memory. While we were rattling around under the hood we also decided to speed up all of our API responses a bit just for good measure.

Additional fixes

Per the usual, we’ve also done work on fixing various bugs, timezone or otherwise, in our perpetual quest to make Metabase run a little smoother. To see the full list of odds and ends, check out the release notes.

That’ll do it for us this time. We’ve got some exciting plans for 2018 so we’ll be seeing you all again soon.

You can download the new version of Metabase at www.metabase.com/start/ To upgrade, see the instructions for your platform. As always we strongly recommend backing up your application database before upgrading.

Users expect increasingly sophisticated analytics and reporting as part of any application.

Whether you are building a SaaS CRM application, an online video site or a blogging site, your users expect to easily look up how many leads a given salesperson closed, how many views their uploads received over time, or what your top referrers are.

Historically, to provide your users with the analytics, you could either build out a custom analytics feature set in your application itself, or use complicated and expensive business intelligence applications.

Metabase now offers a simple, fast way to power your in-application analytics. If you already use Metabase for internally-facing analytics (and you should!), you can quickly reuse reports and dashboards and present them in your application. If you don’t use Metabase, you can easily and quickly create embeddable charts using our graphical interface or by writing SQL queries.

You can embed Metabase into your application either by using a public link, or if you need a more secure method, by using our Secure Embedding integration in your application’s backend server code. Anything that lets you insert an HTML “iframe” can include Metabase powered analytics.

Why power your analytics using Metabase?

To iterate faster

While at times you know exactly what kind of reporting users will need as you’re building the application, frequently these needs change, or you learn more about the usage patterns of your users.

When you use Metabase embedded dashboards, you are defining them in our application instead of in source code. This lets you iterate on them much more quickly:

• Embedded dashboards can be tweaked and changed by analysts instead of engineers.
• The cards in a dashboard can be rearranged without re-compiling and deploying the application.
• You can see exactly how the dashboard layout will look with real data instead of fake or staging server data.
• The underlying queries powering cards and dashboards can be fixed independently of the application.
• You can view and modify the cards in application speed rather than application deployment speed.

Using Metabase to create a user-facing stats portion of your application lets you trade off precise UX control for dramatically faster iteration speed. In that way it is similar to launching a mobile HTML site rather than a native app.

To build analytics gradually

Embedding Metabase charts and dashboards lets you easily build out your applications reporting function. In the early days, you can easily share a dashboard or report with a customer using a public link. This lets you quickly share data in a one-off fashion with specific customers when you don’t know if their specific request should be introduced into your in-application analytics. If users keep asking for the same analysis, take that dashboard or report, parameterize it by customer ID, and then embed it in your application dashboard. You can make minor and gradual changes and you only invest more time in the process after validating a real report with real data to a real customer.

To be consistent across internal and external analytics

Maintaining consistency in analytics numbers and reconciliation is one of the main time sucks in building analytics systems. By using Metabase dashboards for internal and embedding use, it’s quick and easy to compare definitions, filters, etc. to double check that your internal and externally displayed numbers are consistent. Additionally, by reusing Metrics and Segments defined in Metabase, you preemptively avoid these problems of inconsistent numbers appearing in internal dashboards and your application.

Free and commercial options

Anyone can use our embedded features for free with unlimited users, pageviews, charts, or dashboards in any application — personal, commercial or otherwise.

All that we ask is that you keep the small, discrete “Powered by Metabase” attribution visible in your embedding application. If you wish to use Metabase embedding for a commercial application and want to remove this, we offer a simple, no-fuss alternative license. You can start off with our attribution, and then remove it when you launch your application or make money.

You can learn more about how this embedding works in our documentation and purchase a license to remove attribution elements at our store

Frequently asked questions

Does the AGPL apply to my application when I embed Metabase charts in it?

No. When you use either the attribution or the paid no-attribution license, you are not bound by the APGL.

Can I get rid of the logo?

We offer a commercial license that provides a non-AGPL alternative to the attribution license. You’ll help keep the Metabase project going as well as getting customer facing analytics shipped in a fraction of the time it would take to build them in your app.

Is this secure?

With our Secure Embedding, all embedding requests must be cryptographically signed by your application’s server and any parameters you mark as required are validated. That request can never be used to retrieve any extra data, and will be expired after a certain time period.

Do you see my data?

No, we never see your data. If you opt into sharing anonymous stats with us, we will phone home information about how you are using the Metabase application. However, we never see or transmit the actual data, specific queries or any other sensitive information.

Is this a hosted service?

Not at this time. Metabase is super easy to run however, and can be run on Heroku or other managed hosting providers. Try it out yourself.

Will it scale?

The answer to that is “it depends”. In general, for most embedded SaaS applications a single Metabase server on a decently provisioned host should scale just fine. Especially slow data warehouses, large queries, or high numbers of concurrent users might require specific tuning. Metabase can cache data warehouse queries, can take advantage of an external cache, and offers a number of way to optimize performance.

Can I embed Metabase charts in my on-premise software product?

Yes, you can. Please contact us to learn more.

Can I restrict embedded charts by user, or by group?

Just create a query or dashboard that takes a user or group id filter, and when you embed it in your application, select Secure Embedding. This allows you to require that an embed specify a user id.

Can I customize the fonts, colors or other attributes of the charts?

Not at this time. We are actively working to offer up more customization however!

Can I use SQL in embedded reports?

Yes!

Do I need to know SQL to generate reports I can embed in my application?

No, you can embed reports built in our easy to use graphical interface (see our documentation for examples)

Do I need to know how to code to embed Metabase charts in an application?

Yes. While you can embed public dashboards and questions anywhere HTML is allowed, for secure embedding, you will need to integrate us with your backend server. You can see examples of this here.

Metabase 0.29 - The Bots of Summer

Summer’s peeking its head around the corner, and at least for us here in the Metabase HQ hemisphere, we’re looking out the window wishing we had a few less menial data tasks to do. In pursuit of automating more and maybe being in the office a little less as a result, we slapped a fresh coat of paint on our good friend Metabot and asked it to take care of a few more things for us.

Automated explorations

Setting up Metabase for the first time or exploring a new dataset you just connected is now easier than ever. Once you’ve connected to your dataset, Metabot will peruse it and offer up a series of explorations with zero work on your part. Just click around to see what Metabot found, and if anything strikes your fancy you can save it as a dashboard and share it or further tinker with it to your liking. Metabot still can’t replace your in-house data analyst (although it’s been studying at night recently), but these explorations should help give you overviews of the shape and content of your data and help guide you.

Search field values

If you’re dealing with names, addresses, or any large set of values when filtering questions or dashboards, you can now search for values and get results back as you type. This is a feature we’d wished we’d had for so long (and so have many of you) that versions of filtering pre 0.29 feel almost alien to us here at the Metashop now. We hope this makes finding the right values in filters much faster and less headache-inducing for you, too.

Inline tables in pulses

Tables are now invited to the pulse party, too. When you add a tabular question to your pulse, Metabase will show the first 10 columns and 20 rows inline in your email or Slack post.

Spark SQL support

Metabase now has built in support for Spark SQL. Big thanks to Metabase contributor, Joel Wilsson (@wjoel), for all his hard work on this.

Ready to translate

As of Metabase 0.29 the vast majority of Metabase is now ready to be translated. We want to send a special shoutout to our GitHub friend, Joe Bordes, who helped add tags to strings and really acted as a catalyst for us getting to this point. For all of you who have offered to translate or asked for Metabase in your language, we thank you too for being involved. We’re really looking forward to seeing Metabase in a whole bunch of languages going forward.

Our Spanish translation is almost ready, and we expect to release that soon. Stay tuned!

Additional fixes

Per usual, we also tried to capture some bugs and put them outside. Check out the full list of fixes.

How to get version 0.29

You can always download the latest version of Metabase at www.metabase.com/start/ To upgrade, see the instructions for your platform. As always, we strongly recommend backing up your application database before upgrading.

We’re already on our way to 0.30, which we’re very excited about. Thanks as always for your continued use of Metabase, and we’ll see you back here for the next one.

For the past couple of months we’ve been working hard on changes to Metabase that will hopefully make your life much easier, but it also means lots about Metabase has changed. Here are some highlights of what’s different, and some important things you should know before you try out the pre-release.

What’s different

Dashboards and pulses are saved in collections now

We heard from many of you that as your team starts having lots of dashboards, questions, collections, and pulses, that organizing and finding things becomes rough. So now, dashboards and pulses can be saved and organized within your collections, just like saved questions. The old Dashboards and Pulses pages have gone away. To make a new dashboard or pulse, click the plus button in the top-right of Metabase.

Collections can have sub-collections

You can now create or move collections inside of other collections, allowing you to create a hierarchy of collections and unleash your inner organization nerd. Additionally, users who aren’t administrators can now create new collections, as long as they have Curate permission for the current collection.

App-wide search

At the top of the screen in Metabase there’s now a search bar where you can enter in the name of any dashboard, collection, question, or pulse to find it quickly.

The homepage

Right away you’ll notice that the homepage is all different. If you want to see the list of activity that used to be here, just click the bell icon in the top-right of the screen.

The new homepage has three new main sections:

1. Start Here — this will show all the dashboards in your main collection (“Our analytics”) that you’ve pinned. If you don’t have any pinned dashboards, you’ll see some x-ray suggestions here instead.
2. Our Analytics — an overview of your collections. Click on “Browse all items” to see all of your collections and saved items.
3. Our Data — these are the databases you’ve connected to Metabase. Click on one to see its contents and quickly view a table.

Before you upgrade

Before you run off and upgrade in your excitement, here are some things you should know:

• When you upgrade, your existing dashboards and pulses will be moved inside of two new “Migrated dashboards” and “Migrated pulses” collections. Additionally, any saved questions you currently have that are not inside of a collection (i.e. in the “Everything Else” area of the current Questions page) will be moved into a “Migrated questions” collection.
• The rest of your collections and their contents and permission settings won’t be changed at all.
• The new “Migrated” collections’ permissions will be set to admin-only access to make sure no one will accidentally be able to see something that they shouldn’t. To quickly give your users access to any of these items again you can either move them into new appropriate collections; or you can edit the permissions of the migrated collections by clicking the Edit (pencil) icon in the top right of the screen while viewing the collection, and clicking “Edit permissions.”
• As always, you should back up your Metabase application database before you upgrade, just in case.

Let us know what you think!

Once you’ve tried out the pre-release of Metabase 0.30, we’d love to get your feedback if you have a few minutes. Thanks in advance, and as always, thanks for using Metabase.

When we first hit the “Open Source” button on Metabase nearly two and a half years ago, few of us on the team could have imagined exactly where this project would go. We figured we’d get some traction with small startups or non-profits and try our best to be a small island of sanity in an increasingly large and confusing data ocean. Few of us would have imagined thousands of innovative companies large and small deploying us inside of their businesses.

It’s no secret that Metabase still feels like it was designed for those smaller horizons, because it was. We originally made Metabase for teams like ours, small and scrappy and without a lot of worry about data permissions. As we’ve talked with teams about how they’ve adopted the platform we’ve known that we’d eventually have to grow up a bit (don’t worry, not too much), and with Metabase 0.30 we’re reorganizing how Metabase works to make it even better for teams of any size.

Collections

One of our more frequent requests has been to let you organize dashboards in Collections. In 0.30 we’re making Collections first-class citizens in Metabase. Now you can organize dashboards, questions, pulses, and soon metrics and segments to make it easier for people in your org to find the data they need. You can nest collections and set things up to match how you work with data internally.

(Note: if you’re upgrading to 0.30 from a previous version of Metabase, your dashboards, pulses, and some of your questions will be moved to a new location. Learn more here.)

Pinning

It can be a bit hard to know what matters when you’re given a bunch of data to look at. To help guide people in the right direction items in collections can be pinned to the top of the page to highlight what’s important. In order to make it even easier for anyone to get to the important stuff fast, anything you pin in the base “Our analytics” collection shows up on the home page, too, so all it takes is a click after you log in to get to what matters.

Permissions

Part and parcel of working with data is making sure the right people can access your dashboards and questions, and the wrong people can’t. You can now more easily control which dashboards and pulses your users can see by putting them into a collection or sub-collection and setting group permissions accordingly.

Personal collections

Every user in Metabase is now getting their own collection (cue Oprah) so they can save questions and create dashboards that might be specific to their own needs. This should make it easier to keep shared spaces tidy and our hope is it’ll give people more confidence to explore on their own.

App-wide search

Need to find those marketing numbers for Q3 of last year that you tucked away inside of one of those new collections? Search has come to the nav bar so you can find exactly what you’re looking for no matter where you are. You can also filter by item type in collections and in search results.

Data browsing

One of our core beliefs is that if you bring data closer to people good things happen. You can now browse your data directly from the home page so folks can easily get to the raw data they need to get work done.

Comparisons

Curious how Widgets are performing against Gizmos? Well you work at GizWidget Inc, so of course you are. Clicking on any bar or point in a line chart will now offer you the option to look at a comparison of that data versus all the rest. If you’re viewing a segment x-ray, you’ll also now see the option to compare that segment to another segment, or to the whole table.

Conditional formatting

Table nerds, rejoice! You can now add conditional formatting to your tables to highlight the positive or negative aspects of the data. The settings you choose will even show up in pulses.

Add related columns in tables

Even more table love: you can now add columns from related tables in your table visualizations, and reorder them as you please.

Metabase in Spanish!

We’re also very excited to be releasing the first translation of Metabase in Spanish! A huge thank you to our GitHub friend, Joe Bordes, whose hard work made this possible. We’ll be talking about this more in another post shortly. Stay tuned.

If you’re interested in helping translate Metabase into your language, we’ve made it much easier for you to do that. All you have to do is join our translation project on POEditor to get started — there’s no longer any big technical skills required.

Additional fixes

More than 50 other fixes and improvements were crammed into this jam-packed release. Check out the full list of fixes.

How to get version 0.30

You can always download the latest version of Metabase at www.metabase.com/start/.

If you’re upgrading, this is a big release with a lot of changes, so please first check out this list of things to know before you upgrade to 0.30. To upgrade, see the instructions for your platform. As always, we strongly recommend backing up your application database before upgrading.

Tell us what you think!

Once you’ve had a chance to play around with all the cool new changes in 0.30, we’d love to hear what you think. Fill out this short survey to share your thoughts with us. Thanks!

Thanks as always for using Metabase, and we’ll see you back here next time!

We’ve been so excited to see how far Metabase has spread across the globe, and it’s been very clear for a while now that Metabase has lots of users whose preferred language isn’t English.

Last year we announced our intentions to make Metabase translatable, and we put out a call to the open source community to help provide Metabase in different languages. Many people expressed their interest, and there are now half a dozen translations in progress thanks to the community.

But today we want to give an extra special shout-out and thank you to Joe Bordes, who almost single-handedly did all the work to finish translating Metabase into Spanish. This simply wouldn’t have happened without all his efforts. Thanks so much, Joe!

How to get Metabase in Spanish

Provided you’re running the latest and greatest version of Metabase (0.30 as of today!), you and your users simply need to change your web browser settings to mark Spanish as your language of choice. If you’re using Google Chrome for example, you can just open up your settings and type “languages” into the search box to set Spanish to your top preferred language.

Help us translate Metabase into your language!

Helping to translate Metabase is now even easier. As of today, you can join the Metabase translation project on POEditor and start helping with translations without needing any other technical skills. We hope this will greatly speed up the process of releasing translations.

Earlier this month we announced that Metabase had been translated into Spanish, and also told you about the new way that people in the Metabase community can contribute to translating the product into other languages.

Well, the Metabase community is amazing, and we already have another language to announce: Portuguese! Huge thanks to Mauricio Sonegatti, Felipe Valtl de Mello, Ailton Bayma, Fernando Spanò Junqueira de Paiva, and the others whose hard work made this possible.

To get Metabase in Portuguese (along with some bug fixes), update to version 0.30.1, and just set your browser’s preferred language to Portuguese.

We have a feeling you’ll be hearing from us again soon. Talk to you then!

The translations just keep coming! Metabase is already available in Spanish and Portuguese, and with the release of version 0.30.2 we’re happy to announce that French and Norwegian are available as well!

For the French translation, you can join us in thanking users Fabrice Etanchaud, Flegastelois, theniloc, Jean-Luc, Jtraulle, Corentin, Andrew Shaw, Antoine Brivazac, Christophe, Daniel Baldi, Delaunay.alexandre, Emmanuel, Helene, pmint93, Richard, Romain Ciaccafava, and Stéphane Boisson.

And for the Norwegian translation, we have Martin Madsen, Jostein Austvik Jacobsen, and Andreas Meyer Berntsen to thank.

To get Metabase in French or Norwegian (along with some bug fixes), update to version 0.30.2, and just set your browser’s preferred language to the language you’d like.

If you’re interested in helping translate Metabase into a different language, you can contribute here. Thanks in advance!

We’ll keep updating you here as more languages become available, so stay tuned!

Metabase 0.31

After our big update to collections in 0.30 we wanted to get back to basics (or at least basics for us) and work on improving some of our visualization landscape. What came out of that was a version of Metabase worthy of bumping the version number by one: we humbly present to you Metabase 0.31.

New chart types - Gauges, Smart numbers, and Combo charts

Gauge charts have been requested often and we’re glad they’re finally here to help you know when your dashboard is out of fuel. Once you pick the Gauge type we’ll automatically infer some classic red, yellow, and green ranges for you to get things set up quickly. But don’t worry — you have full control over each range and color in the visualization settings.

Smart numbers are basically like our existing numbers but with a bit of extra brain power. Take any existing number and add a time breakout and this visualization type will show you the most recent value and the change for the period, so in just a few clicks you can get your Monthly orders and see how they’ve changed since last month.

You’ll also notice that question visualization settings have gotten a bit more powerful. We’ve introduced a Line + Bar visualization type and you can more easily mix and match lines and bars and control their appreance to give your data the look it deserves.

You might also notice our tables have gotten a bit of a face lift. We wanted them to feel a bit more airy and modern and we’ve added some niceties to help navigating between linked entities easier.

Formatting updates

A long requested feature has been better individual and global controls for formatting of fields. We’ve added the ability to set all sorts of formatting options on a per-question, per-field or global basis. One of our favorites is the ability to turn on histograms for a field in a table to help you understand the values better.

Currency

One particularly useful new formatting setting is the ability to mark a field as representing currency. Once set you can specify which currency and you’ll then see that choice reflected across Metabase.

Bucket of extras

Like any Metabase release we’re not always working on exactly one single theme, so in addition to the charting and formatting work this cycle we also added in things like re-orderable dashboard filters (finally), a bunch of under-the-hood work on the query processor, and a grab bag of other things.

To round things out, we’re extremely happy to tell you that Metabase now supports quite a few languages beyond English. Once again we can’t thank our translation community enough for their work in making Metabase play nice around the world. If you’d like to help translate Metabase to your language, check out our translation project over at POEditor.

How to get version 0.31

You can always download the latest version of Metabase at www.metabase.com/start/. To upgrade, see the instructions for your platform. As always, we strongly recommend backing up your application database before upgrading.

We’ll see you next time for another episode of “when the version number goes up.” Until then, thanks for being a Metabase user, and let us know what you think of the new stuff over in the forums.

How’s 2018 been for you so far? Good we hope. It’s certainly been busy here at the proverbial Meta base, and as such we’ve got either an extremely early Valentine’s Day or an extremely late holiday gift for you. What we know for certain is we named it Metabase 0.28, and we think you’ll get along well with it.

Text with your dashboards

While a chart can say a lot, sometimes it needs a little help. That’s where you come in because you can now add text cards to dashboards. Use them to help explain a metric, organize a set of visualizations with a title, or explain why the numbers are down because the cat walked over the keyboard again. Since the cards are Markdown-based you can include links, pictures (or GIFs), bullet points — really anything you need to give the right context alongside your data.

Pulse attachments

We know a bunch of you have workflows that require getting a table out of Metabase and into the hands of your team on a regular basis. Pulses now have your back. For any question you add to a pulse you can now attach the full result as a CSV or XLS file.

Multi-select dashboard filters

Ever needed to filter a dashboard by a specific state, for example, but wanted to include more than one state in that filter? Well, now you can. I guess you could say we’ve checked that box.

Current period in time filters

In the past, to prevent showing partial data, when you’ve filtered data in Metabase by time using our query builder we’ve not included the current day, week, etc. But since that’s not always what you want, we added the option to include the current period if you need that in your charts or tables.

Performance improvements

As we’ve added new features over the past few years we’ve noticed and heard from you all that we’ve incurred some performance debt. We decided to pay some of that back this release by optimizing the sync process and API calls to use less memory. While we were rattling around under the hood we also decided to speed up all of our API responses a bit just for good measure.

Additional fixes

Per the usual, we’ve also done work on fixing various bugs, timezone or otherwise, in our perpetual quest to make Metabase run a little smoother. To see the full list of odds and ends, check out the release notes.

That’ll do it for us this time. We’ve got some exciting plans for 2018 so we’ll be seeing you all again soon.

You can download the new version of Metabase at www.metabase.com/start/ To upgrade, see the instructions for your platform. As always we strongly recommend backing up your application database before upgrading.

Users expect increasingly sophisticated analytics and reporting as part of any application.

Whether you are building a SaaS CRM application, an online video site or a blogging site, your users expect to easily look up how many leads a given salesperson closed, how many views their uploads received over time, or what your top referrers are.

Historically, to provide your users with the analytics, you could either build out a custom analytics feature set in your application itself, or use complicated and expensive business intelligence applications.

Metabase now offers a simple, fast way to power your in-application analytics. If you already use Metabase for internally-facing analytics (and you should!), you can quickly reuse reports and dashboards and present them in your application. If you don’t use Metabase, you can easily and quickly create embeddable charts using our graphical interface or by writing SQL queries.

You can embed Metabase into your application either by using a public link, or if you need a more secure method, by using our Secure Embedding integration in your application’s backend server code. Anything that lets you insert an HTML “iframe” can include Metabase powered analytics.

Why power your analytics using Metabase?

To iterate faster

While at times you know exactly what kind of reporting users will need as you’re building the application, frequently these needs change, or you learn more about the usage patterns of your users.

When you use Metabase embedded dashboards, you are defining them in our application instead of in source code. This lets you iterate on them much more quickly:

• Embedded dashboards can be tweaked and changed by analysts instead of engineers.
• The cards in a dashboard can be rearranged without re-compiling and deploying the application.
• You can see exactly how the dashboard layout will look with real data instead of fake or staging server data.
• The underlying queries powering cards and dashboards can be fixed independently of the application.
• You can view and modify the cards in application speed rather than application deployment speed.

Using Metabase to create a user-facing stats portion of your application lets you trade off precise UX control for dramatically faster iteration speed. In that way it is similar to launching a mobile HTML site rather than a native app.

To build analytics gradually

Embedding Metabase charts and dashboards lets you easily build out your applications reporting function. In the early days, you can easily share a dashboard or report with a customer using a public link. This lets you quickly share data in a one-off fashion with specific customers when you don’t know if their specific request should be introduced into your in-application analytics. If users keep asking for the same analysis, take that dashboard or report, parameterize it by customer ID, and then embed it in your application dashboard. You can make minor and gradual changes and you only invest more time in the process after validating a real report with real data to a real customer.

To be consistent across internal and external analytics

Maintaining consistency in analytics numbers and reconciliation is one of the main time sucks in building analytics systems. By using Metabase dashboards for internal and embedding use, it’s quick and easy to compare definitions, filters, etc. to double check that your internal and externally displayed numbers are consistent. Additionally, by reusing Metrics and Segments defined in Metabase, you preemptively avoid these problems of inconsistent numbers appearing in internal dashboards and your application.

Free and commercial options

Anyone can use our embedded features for free with unlimited users, pageviews, charts, or dashboards in any application — personal, commercial or otherwise.

All that we ask is that you keep the small, discrete “Powered by Metabase” attribution visible in your embedding application. If you wish to use Metabase embedding for a commercial application and want to remove this, we offer a simple, no-fuss alternative license. You can start off with our attribution, and then remove it when you launch your application or make money.

You can learn more about how this embedding works in our documentation and purchase a license to remove attribution elements at our store

Frequently asked questions

Does the AGPL apply to my application when I embed Metabase charts in it?

No. When you use either the attribution or the paid no-attribution license, you are not bound by the APGL.

Can I get rid of the logo?

We offer a commercial license that provides a non-AGPL alternative to the attribution license. You’ll help keep the Metabase project going as well as getting customer facing analytics shipped in a fraction of the time it would take to build them in your app.

Is this secure?

With our Secure Embedding, all embedding requests must be cryptographically signed by your application’s server and any parameters you mark as required are validated. That request can never be used to retrieve any extra data, and will be expired after a certain time period.

Do you see my data?

No, we never see your data. If you opt into sharing anonymous stats with us, we will phone home information about how you are using the Metabase application. However, we never see or transmit the actual data, specific queries or any other sensitive information.

Is this a hosted service?

Not at this time. Metabase is super easy to run however, and can be run on Heroku or other managed hosting providers. Try it out yourself.

Will it scale?

The answer to that is “it depends”. In general, for most embedded SaaS applications a single Metabase server on a decently provisioned host should scale just fine. Especially slow data warehouses, large queries, or high numbers of concurrent users might require specific tuning. Metabase can cache data warehouse queries, can take advantage of an external cache, and offers a number of way to optimize performance.

Can I embed Metabase charts in my on-premise software product?

Yes, you can. Please contact us to learn more.

Can I restrict embedded charts by user, or by group?

Just create a query or dashboard that takes a user or group id filter, and when you embed it in your application, select Secure Embedding. This allows you to require that an embed specify a user id.

Can I customize the fonts, colors or other attributes of the charts?

Not at this time. We are actively working to offer up more customization however!

Can I use SQL in embedded reports?

Yes!

Do I need to know SQL to generate reports I can embed in my application?

No, you can embed reports built in our easy to use graphical interface (see our documentation for examples)

Do I need to know how to code to embed Metabase charts in an application?

Yes. While you can embed public dashboards and questions anywhere HTML is allowed, for secure embedding, you will need to integrate us with your backend server. You can see examples of this here.

Metabase 0.29 - The Bots of Summer

Summer’s peeking its head around the corner, and at least for us here in the Metabase HQ hemisphere, we’re looking out the window wishing we had a few less menial data tasks to do. In pursuit of automating more and maybe being in the office a little less as a result, we slapped a fresh coat of paint on our good friend Metabot and asked it to take care of a few more things for us.

Automated explorations

Setting up Metabase for the first time or exploring a new dataset you just connected is now easier than ever. Once you’ve connected to your dataset, Metabot will peruse it and offer up a series of explorations with zero work on your part. Just click around to see what Metabot found, and if anything strikes your fancy you can save it as a dashboard and share it or further tinker with it to your liking. Metabot still can’t replace your in-house data analyst (although it’s been studying at night recently), but these explorations should help give you overviews of the shape and content of your data and help guide you.

Search field values

If you’re dealing with names, addresses, or any large set of values when filtering questions or dashboards, you can now search for values and get results back as you type. This is a feature we’d wished we’d had for so long (and so have many of you) that versions of filtering pre 0.29 feel almost alien to us here at the Metashop now. We hope this makes finding the right values in filters much faster and less headache-inducing for you, too.

Inline tables in pulses

Tables are now invited to the pulse party, too. When you add a tabular question to your pulse, Metabase will show the first 10 columns and 20 rows inline in your email or Slack post.

Spark SQL support

Metabase now has built in support for Spark SQL. Big thanks to Metabase contributor, Joel Wilsson (@wjoel), for all his hard work on this.

Ready to translate

As of Metabase 0.29 the vast majority of Metabase is now ready to be translated. We want to send a special shoutout to our GitHub friend, Joe Bordes, who helped add tags to strings and really acted as a catalyst for us getting to this point. For all of you who have offered to translate or asked for Metabase in your language, we thank you too for being involved. We’re really looking forward to seeing Metabase in a whole bunch of languages going forward.

Our Spanish translation is almost ready, and we expect to release that soon. Stay tuned!

Additional fixes

Per usual, we also tried to capture some bugs and put them outside. Check out the full list of fixes.

How to get version 0.29

You can always download the latest version of Metabase at www.metabase.com/start/ To upgrade, see the instructions for your platform. As always, we strongly recommend backing up your application database before upgrading.

We’re already on our way to 0.30, which we’re very excited about. Thanks as always for your continued use of Metabase, and we’ll see you back here for the next one.

For the past couple of months we’ve been working hard on changes to Metabase that will hopefully make your life much easier, but it also means lots about Metabase has changed. Here are some highlights of what’s different, and some important things you should know before you try out the pre-release.

What’s different

Dashboards and pulses are saved in collections now

We heard from many of you that as your team starts having lots of dashboards, questions, collections, and pulses, that organizing and finding things becomes rough. So now, dashboards and pulses can be saved and organized within your collections, just like saved questions. The old Dashboards and Pulses pages have gone away. To make a new dashboard or pulse, click the plus button in the top-right of Metabase.

Collections can have sub-collections

You can now create or move collections inside of other collections, allowing you to create a hierarchy of collections and unleash your inner organization nerd. Additionally, users who aren’t administrators can now create new collections, as long as they have Curate permission for the current collection.

App-wide search

At the top of the screen in Metabase there’s now a search bar where you can enter in the name of any dashboard, collection, question, or pulse to find it quickly.

The homepage

Right away you’ll notice that the homepage is all different. If you want to see the list of activity that used to be here, just click the bell icon in the top-right of the screen.

The new homepage has three new main sections:

1. Start Here — this will show all the dashboards in your main collection (“Our analytics”) that you’ve pinned. If you don’t have any pinned dashboards, you’ll see some x-ray suggestions here instead.
2. Our Analytics — an overview of your collections. Click on “Browse all items” to see all of your collections and saved items.
3. Our Data — these are the databases you’ve connected to Metabase. Click on one to see its contents and quickly view a table.

Before you upgrade

Before you run off and upgrade in your excitement, here are some things you should know:

• When you upgrade, your existing dashboards and pulses will be moved inside of two new “Migrated dashboards” and “Migrated pulses” collections. Additionally, any saved questions you currently have that are not inside of a collection (i.e. in the “Everything Else” area of the current Questions page) will be moved into a “Migrated questions” collection.
• The rest of your collections and their contents and permission settings won’t be changed at all.
• The new “Migrated” collections’ permissions will be set to admin-only access to make sure no one will accidentally be able to see something that they shouldn’t. To quickly give your users access to any of these items again you can either move them into new appropriate collections; or you can edit the permissions of the migrated collections by clicking the Edit (pencil) icon in the top right of the screen while viewing the collection, and clicking “Edit permissions.”
• As always, you should back up your Metabase application database before you upgrade, just in case.

Let us know what you think!

Once you’ve tried out the pre-release of Metabase 0.30, we’d love to get your feedback if you have a few minutes. Thanks in advance, and as always, thanks for using Metabase.

When we first hit the “Open Source” button on Metabase nearly two and a half years ago, few of us on the team could have imagined exactly where this project would go. We figured we’d get some traction with small startups or non-profits and try our best to be a small island of sanity in an increasingly large and confusing data ocean. Few of us would have imagined thousands of innovative companies large and small deploying us inside of their businesses.

It’s no secret that Metabase still feels like it was designed for those smaller horizons, because it was. We originally made Metabase for teams like ours, small and scrappy and without a lot of worry about data permissions. As we’ve talked with teams about how they’ve adopted the platform we’ve known that we’d eventually have to grow up a bit (don’t worry, not too much), and with Metabase 0.30 we’re reorganizing how Metabase works to make it even better for teams of any size.

Collections

One of our more frequent requests has been to let you organize dashboards in Collections. In 0.30 we’re making Collections first-class citizens in Metabase. Now you can organize dashboards, questions, pulses, and soon metrics and segments to make it easier for people in your org to find the data they need. You can nest collections and set things up to match how you work with data internally.

(Note: if you’re upgrading to 0.30 from a previous version of Metabase, your dashboards, pulses, and some of your questions will be moved to a new location. Learn more here.)

Pinning

It can be a bit hard to know what matters when you’re given a bunch of data to look at. To help guide people in the right direction items in collections can be pinned to the top of the page to highlight what’s important. In order to make it even easier for anyone to get to the important stuff fast, anything you pin in the base “Our analytics” collection shows up on the home page, too, so all it takes is a click after you log in to get to what matters.

Permissions

Part and parcel of working with data is making sure the right people can access your dashboards and questions, and the wrong people can’t. You can now more easily control which dashboards and pulses your users can see by putting them into a collection or sub-collection and setting group permissions accordingly.

Personal collections

Every user in Metabase is now getting their own collection (cue Oprah) so they can save questions and create dashboards that might be specific to their own needs. This should make it easier to keep shared spaces tidy and our hope is it’ll give people more confidence to explore on their own.

App-wide search

Need to find those marketing numbers for Q3 of last year that you tucked away inside of one of those new collections? Search has come to the nav bar so you can find exactly what you’re looking for no matter where you are. You can also filter by item type in collections and in search results.

Data browsing

One of our core beliefs is that if you bring data closer to people good things happen. You can now browse your data directly from the home page so folks can easily get to the raw data they need to get work done.

Comparisons

Curious how Widgets are performing against Gizmos? Well you work at GizWidget Inc, so of course you are. Clicking on any bar or point in a line chart will now offer you the option to look at a comparison of that data versus all the rest. If you’re viewing a segment x-ray, you’ll also now see the option to compare that segment to another segment, or to the whole table.

Conditional formatting

Table nerds, rejoice! You can now add conditional formatting to your tables to highlight the positive or negative aspects of the data. The settings you choose will even show up in pulses.

Add related columns in tables

Even more table love: you can now add columns from related tables in your table visualizations, and reorder them as you please.

Metabase in Spanish!

We’re also very excited to be releasing the first translation of Metabase in Spanish! A huge thank you to our GitHub friend, Joe Bordes, whose hard work made this possible. We’ll be talking about this more in another post shortly. Stay tuned.

If you’re interested in helping translate Metabase into your language, we’ve made it much easier for you to do that. All you have to do is join our translation project on POEditor to get started — there’s no longer any big technical skills required.

Additional fixes

More than 50 other fixes and improvements were crammed into this jam-packed release. Check out the full list of fixes.

How to get version 0.30

You can always download the latest version of Metabase at www.metabase.com/start/.

If you’re upgrading, this is a big release with a lot of changes, so please first check out this list of things to know before you upgrade to 0.30. To upgrade, see the instructions for your platform. As always, we strongly recommend backing up your application database before upgrading.

Tell us what you think!

Once you’ve had a chance to play around with all the cool new changes in 0.30, we’d love to hear what you think. Fill out this short survey to share your thoughts with us. Thanks!

Thanks as always for using Metabase, and we’ll see you back here next time!

We’ve been so excited to see how far Metabase has spread across the globe, and it’s been very clear for a while now that Metabase has lots of users whose preferred language isn’t English.

Last year we announced our intentions to make Metabase translatable, and we put out a call to the open source community to help provide Metabase in different languages. Many people expressed their interest, and there are now half a dozen translations in progress thanks to the community.

But today we want to give an extra special shout-out and thank you to Joe Bordes, who almost single-handedly did all the work to finish translating Metabase into Spanish. This simply wouldn’t have happened without all his efforts. Thanks so much, Joe!

How to get Metabase in Spanish

Provided you’re running the latest and greatest version of Metabase (0.30 as of today!), you and your users simply need to change your web browser settings to mark Spanish as your language of choice. If you’re using Google Chrome for example, you can just open up your settings and type “languages” into the search box to set Spanish to your top preferred language.

Help us translate Metabase into your language!

Helping to translate Metabase is now even easier. As of today, you can join the Metabase translation project on POEditor and start helping with translations without needing any other technical skills. We hope this will greatly speed up the process of releasing translations.

Earlier this month we announced that Metabase had been translated into Spanish, and also told you about the new way that people in the Metabase community can contribute to translating the product into other languages.

Well, the Metabase community is amazing, and we already have another language to announce: Portuguese! Huge thanks to Mauricio Sonegatti, Felipe Valtl de Mello, Ailton Bayma, Fernando Spanò Junqueira de Paiva, and the others whose hard work made this possible.

To get Metabase in Portuguese (along with some bug fixes), update to version 0.30.1, and just set your browser’s preferred language to Portuguese.

We have a feeling you’ll be hearing from us again soon. Talk to you then!

The translations just keep coming! Metabase is already available in Spanish and Portuguese, and with the release of version 0.30.2 we’re happy to announce that French and Norwegian are available as well!

For the French translation, you can join us in thanking users Fabrice Etanchaud, Flegastelois, theniloc, Jean-Luc, Jtraulle, Corentin, Andrew Shaw, Antoine Brivazac, Christophe, Daniel Baldi, Delaunay.alexandre, Emmanuel, Helene, pmint93, Richard, Romain Ciaccafava, and Stéphane Boisson.

And for the Norwegian translation, we have Martin Madsen, Jostein Austvik Jacobsen, and Andreas Meyer Berntsen to thank.

To get Metabase in French or Norwegian (along with some bug fixes), update to version 0.30.2, and just set your browser’s preferred language to the language you’d like.

If you’re interested in helping translate Metabase into a different language, you can contribute here. Thanks in advance!

We’ll keep updating you here as more languages become available, so stay tuned!

Metabase 0.31

After our big update to collections in 0.30 we wanted to get back to basics (or at least basics for us) and work on improving some of our visualization landscape. What came out of that was a version of Metabase worthy of bumping the version number by one: we humbly present to you Metabase 0.31.

New chart types - Gauges, Smart numbers, and Combo charts

Gauge charts have been requested often and we’re glad they’re finally here to help you know when your dashboard is out of fuel. Once you pick the Gauge type we’ll automatically infer some classic red, yellow, and green ranges for you to get things set up quickly. But don’t worry — you have full control over each range and color in the visualization settings.

Smart numbers are basically like our existing numbers but with a bit of extra brain power. Take any existing number and add a time breakout and this visualization type will show you the most recent value and the change for the period, so in just a few clicks you can get your Monthly orders and see how they’ve changed since last month.

You’ll also notice that question visualization settings have gotten a bit more powerful. We’ve introduced a Line + Bar visualization type and you can more easily mix and match lines and bars and control their appreance to give your data the look it deserves.

You might also notice our tables have gotten a bit of a face lift. We wanted them to feel a bit more airy and modern and we’ve added some niceties to help navigating between linked entities easier.

Formatting updates

A long requested feature has been better individual and global controls for formatting of fields. We’ve added the ability to set all sorts of formatting options on a per-question, per-field or global basis. One of our favorites is the ability to turn on histograms for a field in a table to help you understand the values better.

Currency

One particularly useful new formatting setting is the ability to mark a field as representing currency. Once set you can specify which currency and you’ll then see that choice reflected across Metabase.

Bucket of extras

Like any Metabase release we’re not always working on exactly one single theme, so in addition to the charting and formatting work this cycle we also added in things like re-orderable dashboard filters (finally), a bunch of under-the-hood work on the query processor, and a grab bag of other things.

To round things out, we’re extremely happy to tell you that Metabase now supports quite a few languages beyond English. Once again we can’t thank our translation community enough for their work in making Metabase play nice around the world. If you’d like to help translate Metabase to your language, check out our translation project over at POEditor.

How to get version 0.31

You can always download the latest version of Metabase at www.metabase.com/start/. To upgrade, see the instructions for your platform. As always, we strongly recommend backing up your application database before upgrading.

We’ll see you next time for another episode of “when the version number goes up.” Until then, thanks for being a Metabase user, and let us know what you think of the new stuff over in the forums.

Hello! We’re blogging again so it must be time for a Metabase release. It’s been a while since we’ve seen you all, but that’s because we’ve been down in the basement shoring up some foundational elements of Metabase to make it more reliable and easier to run.

Modular drivers and less memory consumption

One of the biggest changes in 0.32 is how database drivers work. Drivers for your database of choice now live in their own directory and don’t get loaded until you actually try and do something like connect to the database or run a query. We’ve seen this change shave around 200 MB off of memory usage in tests(!).

We’re also excited for what this will mean for new database drivers going forward. This system should make it much easier to develop your own 3rd-party database driver to use and share.

Async web server

While we were tinkering, we also moved our API endpoints to be async instead of blocking. In human terms, this means that Metabase should be more performant overall, and less likely to crash if one request goes bad (say, for example, if Kyle on the design team does something silly right before his lunch break).

Support for more langauges

Thanks to the hard work from our contributors, we’ve also added support for five new languages: Russian, Vietnamese, Catalan, Italian, and Ukranian. To see any of these in action, just change your browser’s preferred language after updating Metabase. To help us translate Metabase into your own language of choice, all you have to do is join our PoEditor project.

Additional bits and bobs

We’ve given Metabot some books to read — our bot is nothing if not studious — so now the heuristics it uses to analyze your data when you connect a new database or work with X-rays should be improved. You’ll also see more diverse X-ray filters. And if you’ve previously encountered smart scalars sometimes being… not always so smart about previous values, we’ve added a fix for that as well.

Bug fixes

We’ve also fixed more than 20 bugs as part of this release. Here’s a list of all of them over on GitHub.

Looking forward

To set the stage for 0.33, our old friend the query builder will be getting the spotlight. It’s done a lot in its 3.5 years of service, but we want to make easy questions even easier and enable some brand new things you can do without knowing SQL, so we’ve been working on some updates to it. We’re excited to start getting your feedback on all that, so please stay tuned for more.

Until then, thanks for using Metabase!

TL;DR: Metabase raised a Series-A and now has an Enterprise Edition

It’s been just over 3 years since we launched in 2015 with another TL;DR of “Open Source Business Intelligence. Installs in 5 minutes, usable by everyone in your company”. Since then, we’ve been starred 14k+ times on Github, have had 10M+ Docker Hub pulls (plus another million direct downloads), and have been helped by 140 external contributors. We’ve been translated into 14 languages, and helped users from over 150 countries explore their data.

As we’ve grown, we’ve been committed to maintaining a high bar for our usability and user experience as we’ve shipped a wide variety of new features in 20 major releases. Holding ourselves to the standard of “usable by everyone in your company” has required us to say “no” to a great many feature requests and code submissions. Our users love how simple, elegant and beautiful our interface is for an analytics product, open source or not.

At the same time, the scope of the project has expanded dramatically. We are used in a wide variety of industries and countries to explore data in 13 databases in use cases ranging from company-wide BI to engineers checking in on microservices to powering customer-facing analytics. We currently have close to 2,000 open issues and a core team of only 6 full-time people.

We’ve always dreamed big. Our goal has always been to become the default that anyone in the world reaches for when they want to explore their data or thread data through their company. We want everyone to have the information and context they need in the course of their work days, not just folks with fancy titles and well-trained analysts on hand.

To fully realize this vision and sustain it over the years to come, we needed help and resources. To this end, we’re stoked to announce our Series A. NEA has invested $8M in Metabase and Julia Schottenstein is joining our board of directors. We are excited by NEA’s experience incubating and partnering with Tableau as well their wide experience with Open Source companies like MongoDB, Elastic, Nginx, and Databricks.

With this round, we’ll be able to hire more aggressively and more rapidly improve our product and support our community of users, developers and partners.

Since we have your attention, we are also unveiling our Enterprise edition. This edition has been the second worst-kept secret in the Metabase community. We’ve been quietly developing it over the last year and a number of our users have made the jump. It is tailored to companies running Metabase at scale (100s or 1,000s of accounts) and companies that want to provide self-service reporting to their users. A number of our users have made the jump in helping us get it ready, and if that intrigues you, you can learn more here.

Now you probably have one very big question at this point, between the funding announcement and the enterprise announcement, so here’s hopefully a good answer to it in very big type that will tell you where our head is at around all this.

Building the best open source product we possibly can is always going to be our primary focus.

It’s why we started working on this, it’s how we got here, and we won’t ever forget that.

While we take a quick breath and reflect on all that’s happened since launch, one other thing we should say is thank you. Whether you’ve been with us since October 2015, back when things looked very different, or first heard about us a week ago, we wouldn’t be where we are without your bug reports, pull requests, translations, feature requests, issue nudges, thumbs ups, and feedback. Seeing all the ways Metabase is being used, and how much Metabase means to people all around the world gives us constant joy.

And so, from the entire Metabase team - thank you.