Metabase pricing guide details
Pricing Overview
Metabase follows an open-source + paid cloud pricing model. The Community Edition (CE) is free and open source, available for any team to self-host at no licensing cost. For teams that want managed hosting and additional features, Metabase offers Cloud Starter, Cloud Pro, and Enterprise plans with progressively more capabilities.
This structure makes Metabase one of the most accessible BI tools on the market. The free Community Edition includes the question builder, SQL editor, dashboards, and 20+ database connectors -- covering the core BI needs of many small and mid-size teams. Paid plans add embedding, team management, priority support, and enterprise security features.
Plan Comparison
| Plan | Price | Billing | Key Features |
|---|---|---|---|
| Community Edition (self-hosted) | Free / Open Source | No license cost | Question builder, SQL editor, dashboards, 20+ database connectors, alerts |
| Cloud Starter | $100/month base + $6/user/month (5 users included) | Monthly | Managed hosting, automatic updates, email support, basic embedding |
| Cloud Pro | $575/month base + $12/user/month (10 users included) | Monthly | White-label embedding, advanced permissions, SSO, priority support |
| Enterprise | Custom pricing | Annual | Self-hosted or cloud, audit logs, advanced security, dedicated support, SAML |
Annual billing provides approximately 10% discount across paid tiers.
Hidden Costs and Considerations
The headline prices cover Metabase licensing, but total cost depends on your deployment model:
- Self-hosted infrastructure: Running Community Edition requires a server (minimum 2GB RAM, recommended 4GB+), a PostgreSQL or MySQL application database, and basic server administration. A small cloud VM (e.g., AWS t3.medium) costs roughly $30-$60/month, making the self-hosted total cost very low.
- Cloud Starter base fee: The $100/month base includes 5 user seats. Additional users cost $6/user/month. A 15-user Cloud Starter deployment costs $100 + (10 extra users x $6) = $160/month.
- Cloud Pro base fee: The $575/month base includes 10 user seats. Additional users cost $12/user/month. A 25-user Cloud Pro deployment costs $575 + (15 extra users x $12) = $755/month.
- Database performance: Metabase queries your databases directly. Complex dashboards with many questions can put significant load on your source databases. You may need to set up a read replica ($50-$200/month) to avoid impacting production database performance.
- Embedding costs: White-label embedding for customer-facing analytics is only available on Cloud Pro and Enterprise. If embedding is a core use case, budget for these higher tiers from the start.
- Missing enterprise features: The free Community Edition lacks SSO, advanced permissions, audit logs, and official support. Teams that need these features must upgrade to paid plans.
Cost Estimates by Team Size
Small team (5 users): The free Community Edition self-hosted on a $30-$60/month VM is the most economical option. If you prefer managed hosting, Cloud Starter at $100/month (5 users included) eliminates server management. Total: $30-$160/month.
Mid-size team (25 users): Cloud Starter with 25 users costs $100 + (20 extra x $6) = $220/month. Cloud Pro with 25 users costs $575 + (15 extra x $12) = $755/month. We recommend Cloud Pro at this scale for the SSO, advanced permissions, and white-label embedding capabilities. Self-hosting Community Edition on more robust infrastructure ($100-$200/month) remains viable for budget-conscious teams that do not need enterprise features.
Enterprise (100+ users): The Enterprise plan is quoted rather than published, and is the option Metabase points large organizations to. It includes all features, can be self-hosted or cloud-deployed, and provides dedicated support. For comparison, Cloud Pro with 100 users would cost $575 + (90 extra x $12) = $1,655/month ($19,860/year), making the Enterprise plan roughly equivalent in cost but with additional security and governance features.
How Metabase Pricing Compares
Metabase is significantly cheaper than Tableau and Looker for comparable deployments. Tableau Standard Edition costs $75/user/month for Creators and $15/user/month for Viewers. A 25-user Tableau deployment (5 Creators + 20 Viewers) costs $675/month -- comparable to Metabase Cloud Pro but without the open-source self-hosting option. Looker publishes no platform or per-user price at all; every edition is quoted.
The trade-off is feature depth. Tableau offers superior visualization variety and ad-hoc exploration. Looker provides a governed semantic layer through LookML. Metabase prioritizes simplicity and accessibility -- its question builder lets non-technical users create reports without learning SQL.
We recommend the free Community Edition for teams under 10 users who have basic server administration capability. Cloud Starter at $100/month is ideal for small teams that want zero maintenance. For organizations embedding analytics into their products, Cloud Pro at $575/month provides white-label capabilities at a fraction of Looker or Tableau's embedded analytics cost.
For teams migrating from spreadsheet-based reporting, Metabase's question builder provides the most accessible on-ramp to self-service BI. Non-technical users can create visualizations by selecting tables, applying filters, and choosing chart types without writing any SQL. This reduces the burden on data teams and accelerates analytics adoption across the organization. The 20+ database connectors support PostgreSQL, MySQL, MongoDB, Snowflake, BigQuery, Redshift, and other popular databases, covering most team's data source needs without additional middleware.
One important consideration: the Community Edition uses the AGPL license, which has implications for organizations that embed Metabase into customer-facing products. AGPL requires sharing source code modifications if Metabase is served over a network. For commercial embedding use cases, the paid Cloud Pro or Enterprise plans include a commercial license that removes this restriction.