Glance vs Heimdall
| Tagline | Highly customizable dashboard that puts all your feeds in one place | Elegant PHP application dashboard to organise all your web applications |
| Category | BI & Dashboards | BI & Dashboards |
| Replaces | Tableau, Looker, Power BI | Tableau, Looker, Power BI |
| GitHub stars | 35k | 9.2k |
| Language | Docker | PHP |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | MIT |
| Self-host difficulty | 2/5 Easy | 2/5 Easy |
| Deploy options | Docker Docker Compose Manual | Docker Docker Compose Manual |
| Managed hosting | ||
| Last updated | 19 days ago | 7 months ago |
| View repo | View repo |
Where each falls short
The honest trade-offs — what you give up with each, versus the proprietary tools they replace.
Glance
- No built-in database or persistent data store; purely a read/aggregation layer
- No multi-user support or access control
- No data source connectors for business databases or warehouses (unlike Tableau/Power BI)
- No interactive charts, pivot tables, or drill-down analytics
Heimdall
- No business analytics, charts, or data visualization
- No native multi-user support with role-based access
- Enhanced App integrations limited to a pre-defined list with no custom plugin API
- No alerting or on-call escalation for service outages
Bottom line
Both are a similar lift to self-host; choose Glance for the larger community and ecosystem. Glance has seen more recent development. Open each guide below for deploy steps and the full feature gap.