When comparing Metabase vs ReportServer, 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 ReportServer is ranked 16th. 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 Active community
Questions on the community forum are usually answered very quickly. Developers are active there.
Pro Easy to use dashboards
Integrates user centric Dashboard components that allows for easy set up of Dashboards that highlighting the most important KPIs and reports.
Pro Powerful scheduler
ReportServer has a powerful built-in scheduler to run reports at recurring intervals. Custom scheduler targets (e.g. webservices or SFTP uploads) can be specified via scripting.
Pro Cross platform and web-based
ReportServer is a Java web application and can thus be installed on any OS supporting java. Being a web-app allows access to it from anywhere without the need to install additional client software
Pro Enterprise version with support available
Besides the open source version, there is also the commercial ReportServer Enterprise edition which adds additional functionality, in particular, support for scripting and Crystal.
Pro Provides intuitive ad-hoc reporting component
ReportServer's Dynamic List provides a very intuitive, yet powerful ad-hoc reporting component.
Pro Supports multiple reorting engines including JasperReports and Eclipse BIRT
ReportServer integrates several reporting engines including the popular JasperReports, Eclipse BIRT and Crystal.
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.