When comparing Metabase vs Tableau, the Slant community recommends Metabase for most people. In the question“What are the best reporting and business intelligence (BI) tools?” Metabase is ranked 2nd while Tableau is ranked 3rd. The most important reason people chose Metabase is:
Metabase is licensed under GPLv3 with source code available on [GitHub](https://github.com/metabase/metabase).
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Free and open source
Metabase is licensed under GPLv3 with source code available on GitHub.
Pro Can send a set of metrics to Slack
Metabase includes a feature called Pulses that can send a set of metrics to Slack daily.
Pro SQL access for more advanced queries
Pro Very powerful user friendly interface
Pro No complex installations / IT approvals needed
If you want to start using Tableau at your company, you don't need huge IT resources or start a big BI deployment. Just purchase the software, install, and you're ready to go. Maybe you don't need ANY IT help at all.
Pro Powerful
Tableau makes it easy to SEE your data and make business decisions based on it.
Pro Appealing visualizations
Hard to compare with what you have to code by hand (Shiny)
Pro Great support
Both Tableau's support team AND the user community are super helpful and enthusiastic about the product.
Pro Easy to learn
You don't have to be super techy to understand it. You can learn how to use Desktop over the course of two days.
Cons
Con General data tool not designed for web analytics
Generic BI data tool, is absent any necessary features required for analytics of web data. Of course it may work with captured data sets, it just doesn't do anything but data.
Con Very early in development
For instance, you can't make a stacked bar graph or edit your axis labels yet.
Con Some simple tasks are sometimes not easy to calculate.
Con Addictive
Once you start using Tableau you don't want to use any other software anymore. So if your manager is obsessed with e.g. Excel, you may have issues.