Homarr vs Metabase
| Tagline | Sleek, modern homelab dashboard with rich integrations and drag-and-drop web config | Easy-to-use open-source BI and embedded analytics for everyone |
| Category | BI & Dashboards | BI & Dashboards |
| Replaces | Tableau, Looker, Power BI | Tableau, Power BI, Looker |
| GitHub stars | 4.7k | 49k |
| Language | Docker | Clojure |
| License | MIT | AGPL-3.0 |
| Self-host difficulty | 3/5 Moderate | 2/5 Easy |
| Deploy options | Docker Docker Compose | One-Click Docker Docker Compose Kubernetes Manual |
| Managed hosting | ||
| Last updated | 2 days ago | yesterday |
| View repo | View repo |
Where each falls short
The honest trade-offs — what you give up with each, versus the proprietary tools they replace.
Homarr
- No BI-style data visualization, SQL queries, or chart-building features
- v1.x migration from v0.x requires manual data migration steps
- Integration library narrower than proprietary enterprise dashboards
- No alerting or on-call notification system built in
Metabase
- Advanced data modeling, row-level security, and SSO are gated behind the paid Pro/Enterprise editions
- Charting and visualization depth is more limited than Tableau or Power BI
- No deep semantic modeling layer like Looker's LookML
- Performance can degrade on very large datasets without careful tuning or caching
Bottom line
Choose Metabase if you want the lower-effort setup; choose Metabase for the larger community and ecosystem. Metabase has seen more recent development. Open each guide below for deploy steps and the full feature gap.
Homarr
Sleek, modern homelab dashboard with rich integrations and drag-and-drop web config