Metabase Pricing
- Analytics pricing
- $100/mo at the smallest
- Free plan
Metabase pricing starts at $100 a month, which is $1,200 over twelve months. There is a free plan, and a trial on the paid tiers: 14 days. Every figure below was read from the vendor's pricing page on 9 August 2026.
Opens the vendor's own pricing page. Figures here were read from it on 9 August 2026.
Metabase ranking and coverage
- In Analytics
- #3 of 4
- Overall
- #58 of 122 tied
- Terms score
- 5.7 /10
- Referenced here
- 1 page
Cost position 0 · Portability 9 · Subscription flexibility 8 - Ranked on published terms only: entry price against category peers, portability and subscription flexibility, equally weighted. This is not a quality score.How the rank is calculated.
Metabase pricing at a glance
| Entry price | Open Source free and self-hosted; Starter $100/month plus $6 per user |
|---|---|
| Smallest invoice | $100 a month, or $1,200 a year |
| How that is reached | Starter at $100 a month |
| Seat minimum | None on the entry plan |
| Free plan | Yes |
| Free trial | 14 days |
| How it charges | subscription |
| Priced plans published | 4 rows on the vendor's page |
| Affiliate programme | No |
| Prices read from | The vendor's own pricing page |
| Last checked | 9 August 2026 |
Every Metabase plan and what it costs
Read from the vendor's own pricing page on 9 August 2026. Charged as subscription. Free trial: 14 days.
| Plan | Price | Billing | What it is |
|---|---|---|---|
| Open Source | $0 | per one-time | Self-hosted, free unlimited users, 20+ data sources, AI question asking |
| Starter | $100 | per month | $90/month billed yearly ($1,080). Plus $6 per user/month. First 5 users included |
| Pro | $575 | per month | $517.50/month billed yearly ($6,210). Plus $12 per user/month. First 10 included |
| Enterprise | Custom pricing | Negotiated | Starts at $20,000 per year. Air gap available, 1-day support SLA |
What Metabase actually costs over a year
A monthly price is not the same thing as a monthly contract. These are the plans above resolved both ways, per seat or unit where the plan is charged that way. Where a vendor quotes only a yearly figure it is divided by twelve rather than left out, and the Quoted column says which figure the vendor actually publishes.
| Plan | Quoted | Monthly | Over 12 months |
|---|---|---|---|
| Starter | per month | $100 | $1,200 |
| Pro | per month | $575 | $6,900 |
Metabase pricing over time
Read from 14 archived captures of the vendor's pricing page , spanning June 2021 to September 2026. Every figure below links to the capture it came from, so you can check it against the page as it stood on the day.
- Starter changed 2 times between 21 June 2021 and 4 September 2026, from $749 to $100 per user.
- Pro changed once between 12 December 2023 and 4 September 2026, from $500 per user to $575 per user, up 15% overall.
Starter
| Published price | Charged | Seen from | Last seen | Capture |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| $749 | Not stated | 21 June 2021 | Single capture | Archive |
| $85 | Not stated | 5 September 2024 | 8 September 2025 | Archive |
| $100 | per user | 11 March 2026 | 4 September 2026 | Archive |
- ↓ $749 to $85, between 21 June 2021 and 5 September 2024 (-88.7%). before / after
- ↔ $85 to $100, between 8 September 2025 and 11 March 2026. One capture quotes per user and the other states no unit, so we cannot confirm the two figures are on the same basis and no percentage is stated. before / after
Pro
2 archived captures with no price we could read
The capture exists, but the figures on it could not be extracted - usually a page that renders prices in JavaScript, or a currency selector the archive did not record. Listed rather than dropped, because a gap in a price history reads as "nothing changed" and these are not that.
Compiled 18 September 2026 from the Internet Archive Wayback Machine. Plan names were matched against the archived page text and the first currency-anchored figure within 160 characters was recorded, rejecting any figure with a competing plan name standing between it and the name it was matched to. The currency and the unit were read from each capture rather than assumed: captures served in a currency other than $, and captures where no plan name sat beside a figure, are listed as unread rather than dropped. Archived pages show the price as served to the archive's crawler, which may differ by region from the price you are shown.
Metabase pricing against its competitors
Compared on the smallest invoice each vendor will accept, not on the advertised per-seat rate. Where a product has a seat minimum, the figure below is the minimum times the rate, because that is the cheque you would actually write.
| Product | Cheapest paid entry | Free plan | Against Metabase |
|---|---|---|---|
| Microsoft Power BI | $14 a month | Yes | −$86 a month (−86%) |
| Tableau | $15 a month | No | −$85 a month (−85%) |
| Metabase | $100 a month | Yes | This product |
Which Metabase plan should you buy?
| Your situation | Recommended | Why |
|---|---|---|
| You can run a container and want free BI | Open Source | Free, self-hosted, unlimited users. A complete BI deployment at no licence cost, missing only the governance layer. |
| You want it hosted with support | Starter | $100 a month plus $6 per user, with the first five users included. |
| You need row-level permissions, SSO or embedding | Pro | $575 a month plus $12 per user. A steep step, but the only tier with governance and multi-tenant embedding. |
| You embed dashboards for your customers | Count your customers as users first | Embedded end users count towards billable users. 500 embedded customers on Starter is roughly $3,070 a month, not $100. |
| You need deep semantic modelling | Consider Power BI instead | Power BI's modelling is far stronger and cheaper per seat if you run Microsoft. |
Verdict by who you are
Small company wanting self-hosted BIYes
Free, unlimited users, deployable in minutes. Nothing else offers this combination.
Team where non-analysts must answer their own questionsYes
The query builder generates real SQL from clicking, which is the thing that actually gets data used rather than requested.
SaaS company embedding analyticsNo
Your customers become billable users. Price this against purpose-built embedding vendors, not against other BI tools.
Analyst wanting deep visual explorationCompare first
Adequate, but Tableau is materially better at open-ended exploration.
Should you buy Metabase?
Buy Metabase if…
- Teams that want non-analysts querying data safely
- Organisations wanting free self-hosted BI
- Straightforward dashboards over a clean warehouse
Do not buy Metabase if…
- Complex governed semantic modelling
- Embedded analytics with very many end users
- Organisations needing Tableau-grade visual exploration
What leaving Metabase would cost
low lock-in
Metabase scores on self-hostable, public API, open source. Portability 9/10 ; lock-in is the inverse. How this is calculated.
Embedded end users count as users
This is the one thing that can make Metabase unexpectedly expensive, and Metabase states it plainly on the pricing page, repeated under every plan:
Both your internal team developing analytics and users of your embeds accessed through your product count as users.
So if you embed dashboards in your own SaaS product for customers, your customers are billable users. A Starter plan at $100 a month with 500 embedded customers is $100 plus 495 chargeable users at $6, which is around $3,070 a month rather than $100.
For internal business intelligence this never bites, because you are counting staff. For embedded analytics it is the whole cost model, and it is the reason to price Metabase against purpose-built embedding vendors rather than against other BI tools.
The ladder, including the yearly discount
| Plan | Monthly | Billed yearly | Per-user | Users included |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Open Source | Free | Free | Free, unlimited | Unlimited |
| Starter | $100 | $90/mo, $1,080/yr | $6/mo or $65/yr | First 5 |
| Pro | $575 | $517.50/mo, $6,210/yr | $12/mo or $130/yr | First 10 |
| Enterprise | Custom | From $20,000/yr | Custom | Custom |
Yearly billing saves 10%. There is a 14-day trial, and a separate deployment toggle for Cloud versus self-hosted.
The gap between Starter and Pro is the notable step: $100 to $575 a month, plus the per-user rate doubling. What you get for it is row and column level permissions, SSO, caching controls, usage auditing and multi-tenant embedding. If you need any one of those, you need Pro.
Open Source is a real product, not a teaser
Self-hosted Metabase is free, with unlimited users, more than 20 data sources, unlimited questions and dashboards, and the AI question-asking features. For a company that can run a container and has a database worth querying, this is a complete BI deployment at no licence cost.
What it lacks is the governance layer: granular permissions, SSO, auditing and official support. Those are exactly the things that start mattering when the tool spreads beyond the team that installed it, which is the honest upgrade trigger.
Where it sits against the big two
Power BI has far stronger semantic modelling and costs $14 a seat, which is hard to beat if your organisation already runs Microsoft. Tableau is better for open-ended visual exploration by analysts.
Metabase wins on adoption and on getting started. It is the tool where the question “can someone just look this up themselves?” has a yes answer, and for many companies that is worth more than modelling depth they would never use.
Metabase questions, answered
- Is Metabase worth it?
- Metabase gets the hardest thing about business intelligence right, which is getting people who are not analysts to actually use it.
- How much does Metabase cost?
- Open Source free and self-hosted; Starter $100/month plus $6 per user. The cheapest paid tier we recorded is Starter, published at $100 a month, which works out at $100 a month or $1,200 over a year. Verified against the vendor's pricing page.
- Does Metabase have a free plan or free trial?
- Metabase has a free plan. A free trial is available: 14 days.
- What is the best Metabase alternative?
- It depends on the job. Power BI: Far deeper modelling and much cheaper per seat if you run Microsoft. Tableau: Better visual exploration for analysts, at considerably more cost. Apache Superset: Also open source, more powerful and considerably harder to run.
- Can I self-host Metabase?
- Yes. Metabase can be run on your own infrastructure, so the data stays under your control.
Opens the vendor's own pricing page. Figures here were read from it on 9 August 2026.
What this profile is based on
Every claim below is about our work, not about Metabase. A "no" is recorded rather than omitted, because the difference between a tested review and careful desk research is the reader's to weigh. How we research a profile.
-
Prices read from the vendor : yes
Read from Metabase's own pricing page on 9 August 2026
-
Plans and terms recorded : yes
4 rows, each with its billing period
-
Original screenshots : yes
2 captured by us: pricing page, homepage
-
Sources cited and dated : yes
1 primary source, each with the date it was read
-
Product used first-hand : no
Not tested. This profile is desk research from primary sources
-
Alternatives used first-hand : no
None, so comparisons here rest on published facts rather than use
-
Vendor contacted : no
Not contacted for this profile
Where Metabase appears on this site
One other page here references Metabase, and it is listed below.
- Another profile Tableau names it as a competitor
Counts pages on this site that name the product by choice - price guides, pricing question pages, deal records and other profiles. Category and directory indexes list everything automatically and are not counted.
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Provenance and freshness
When each fact was last checked
- Pricing ·
- Plans ·
- Free trial
- Features
- Platforms
- Integrations
- Affiliate programme
- Company details
What has changed
-
August 2026
- Pricing verified, including that embedded end users count as billable users
- Added plan picker and verdicts
Sources & verification
Facts on this page were read from the sources below on the dates shown. Where a vendor does not publish a figure, we record it as not disclosed rather than estimating it.
- Metabase pricing - checked 9 August 2026
Spotted something out of date? Email [email protected] and we will re-check it. Corrections are logged on the page.
