Metabase

Metabase is the easy, open-source way for everyone in your company to ask questions and learn from data.

Get started

The easiest way to get started with Metabase is to sign up for a free trial of Metabase Cloud. You get support, backups, upgrades, an SMTP server, SSL certificate, SoC2 Type 2 security auditing, and more (plus your money goes toward improving Metabase). Check out our quick overview of cloud vs self-hosting. If you need to, you can always switch to self-hosting Metabase at any time (or vice versa).

Features

• Set up in five minutes (we're not kidding).
• Let anyone on your team ask questions without knowing SQL.
• Use the SQL editor for more complex queries.
• Build handsome, interactive dashboards with filters, auto-refresh, fullscreen, and custom click behavior.
• Create models that clean up, annotate, and/or combine raw tables.
• Define canonical segments and metrics for your team to use.
• Send data to Slack or email on a schedule with dashboard subscriptions.
• Set up alerts to have Metabase notify you when your data changes.
• Embed charts and dashboards in your app, or even your entire Metabase.

Take a tour of Metabase.

Supported databases

• Officially supported databases
• Partner and Community drivers

Installation

Metabase can be run just about anywhere. Check out our Installation Guides.

Contributing

Quick Setup: Dev environment

In order to spin up a development environment, you need to start the front end and the backend as follows:

Frontend quick setup

The following command will install the Javascript dependencies:

$ yarn install

To build and run without watching changes:

$ yarn build

To build and run with hot-reload:

$ yarn build-hot

Backend quick setup

In order to run the backend, you'll need to build the drivers first, and then start the backend:

$ ./bin/build-drivers.sh
$ clojure -M:run

For a more detailed setup of a dev environment for Metabase, check out our Developers Guide.

MAGE - Development Automation

You need Babashka to run The Metabase Automation Genius Engine (MAGE). Run ./bin/mage to list your tasks. All of them support -h to learn more and show examples.

$ ./bin/mage
   ███╗   ███╗ █████╗  ██████╗ ███████╗
   ████╗ ████║██╔══██╗██╔════╝ ██╔════╝
   ██╔████╔██║███████║██║  ███╗█████╗
   ██║╚██╔╝██║██╔══██║██║   ██║██╔══╝
   ██║ ╚═╝ ██║██║  ██║╚██████╔╝███████╗
   ╚═╝     ╚═╝╚═╝  ╚═╝ ╚═════╝ ╚══════╝
    The Metabase Automation Genius Engine

The following tasks are available:

cljfmt-staged   Runs cljfmt on staged files
...
kondo           Runs Kondo against a file, directory, or everything we usually lint
...
start-db        Start a db on a default port in docker
jar-download    Given a version, downloads a metabase jar
$ ./bin/mage kondo -h
<prints help for easily running kondo>

mage Autocomplete

Run ./bin/mage -autocomplete and follow the instructions to setup autocomplete in your terminal.

Internationalization

We want Metabase to be available in as many languages as possible. See which translations are available and help contribute to internationalization using our project over at POEditor. You can also check out our policies on translations.

Extending Metabase

Hit our Query API from Javascript to integrate analytics. Metabase enables your application to:

• Build moderation interfaces.
• Export subsets of your users to third party marketing automation software.
• Provide a custom customer lookup application for the people in your company.

Check out our guide, Working with the Metabase API.

Security Disclosure

See SECURITY.md for details.

License

This repository contains the source code for both the Open Source edition of Metabase, released under the AGPL, as well as the commercial editions of Metabase, which are released under the Metabase Commercial Software License.

See LICENSE.txt for details.

Unless otherwise noted, all files © 2025 Metabase, Inc.

Metabase Experts

If you’d like more technical resources to set up your data stack with Metabase, connect with a Metabase Expert.