open-source-bi
(5)
The Free Dashboard Has a Maintenance Bill
Apache Superset began as a three-day Airbnb hackathon. Preset’s bet is that the software can stay open while someone pays to keep it running, secure and useful.
InetSoft Spent 29 Years Making Business Intelligence Less of an IT Project
The New Jersey software company started with a Java reporting engine and survived every new era of analytics. Its current bet is that the next BI winner will be smaller, embeddable and open enough to run wherever the data already lives.
Hamzah Chaudhary Is Turning Business Intelligence Into a Builder’s Medium
Lightdash began as a scrappy internal tool that a customer asked to use. Hamzah Chaudhary turned that accidental signal into a broader argument: data teams should build with the discipline, freedom and leverage of software teams.
Lightdash
Lightdash is an open-source business intelligence platform built natively on dbt. It turns a data team's dbt models into a governed semantic layer, letting analysts define metrics as code and letting everyone else explore data - and, increasingly, ask AI agents questions - without writing SQL. Founded in 2020 (originally as Hubble in Y Combinator's S20 batch), it positions itself as an open, developer-first alternative to Looker and is backed by Accel, Shopify Ventures, Operator Partners and Y Combinator.
Metabase
Metabase is an open source business intelligence and embedded analytics platform that lets anyone - not just analysts - ask questions of their data and build dashboards without writing SQL. Founded in 2014 and spun out of the Expa venture studio, it pairs a friendly visual query builder with a full SQL editor, connects to 20+ databases, and offers white-label embedding so software companies can ship customer-facing analytics. With a free self-hosted edition and paid Cloud and Enterprise tiers, Metabase is used by tens of thousands of companies worldwide.