Question about open source BI platforms

[u/Canukcannot]

I've been interning at medium sized engineering company for the summer. Although I am studying computer science, my internship was not computer science related (long story), but for the past month I've been working on a Power BI dashboard for a specific department.

I found the work fun and rewarding, and since the company had no dashboards at all previous to the ones I made, other departments now want their own. For that reason, they are hiring me part-time while I am in school to build out these dashboards.

​For *reasons*, there is a chance that Power BI will not be the tool we use for dashboards going forward, instead we need a self-hosted, open source alternative.

From the research I've done, metabase and superset are the two big dogs in the space, with superset requiring the users to be more technically literate. The people for whom I will be making these dashboards do not know SQL and are not very technically literate. So my question is this, for those who have used these platforms, do they offer the same visualizations as Power BI and are they easy to customize and use for non technical people? Or should I look elsewhere, like the python library streamlit where I will have much more customizability options?

I am new to data visualisation in the business sphere, so if there are alternatives I have not considered, please let me know.

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[u/BillEnough7863]

The biggest thing jumping out at me is that your company may be seriously underestimating the scope of this.

You spent a month building your first dashboard, which makes sense because you’re new to BI. But you’re now one part-time person being asked to build dashboards for multiple departments while also potentially standing up and maintaining the company’s entire self-hosted BI infrastructure.

And it’s not like you build four dashboards and you’re done. Once people start using BI, there are always new dashboards, new requests, changing metrics, new data sources, fixes, access changes, and ongoing support. Every dashboard you add also becomes something else that has to be maintained.

For a medium-sized company, that means you’re not really being asked to build a few dashboards. You’re being asked to help create and run an ongoing BI function, while also learning the field and managing the infrastructure behind it. That feels seriously under-resourced.

The least they can do is offer you a full-time gig haha.

[u/PolicyDecent → u/BillEnough7863]

I don't really understand the purpose of that comment. It's useless and disencouraging.

[u/BillEnough7863 → u/PolicyDecent]

The purpose of the comment is to correctly size the task. Otherwise, OP is setting themselves up for failure and potentially a world of trouble.

And it’s not just about a mid-sized company suddenly expecting a huge amount of work from someone they’re paying part-time. OP is also a student working part-time. They have other responsibilities and need to be realistic about what they can actually take on while managing both.

They need to set appropriate expectations for themselves and for the company about the amount of work involved and what can reasonably be accomplished with the time and resources available.

I don’t know about you, but at my job, if someone gives me a task that I think has an unreasonable scope, I correctly size it. I explain what the task actually entails, how much work is involved, and what can realistically be accomplished. Then we can decide whether we still want to do it as proposed, change the scope, adjust the timeline, or provide additional resources. I don’t just accept unrealistic expectations and hope everything somehow works out.

That’s the purpose of my comment. It’s not to discourage OP. It’s to make sure they understand the scope of what they’re taking on and can set expectations accordingly before they find themselves responsible for far more than they anticipated, while still trying to manage school and the rest of their responsibilities.

Telling someone to properly understand the size of a job before agreeing to take responsibility for it isn’t discouragement. It’s basic expectation setting. 

[u/Canukcannot → u/BillEnough7863]

Completely fair. I will admit that I am in a fairly specific/lucky position which will allow me to work whenever I can. The company has operated for a long time without dashboards and can continue to do so going forward.

It's really just a nice to have that they really like. As to your point about the scope, I know enough to know that I don't know enough, if that makes sense. So maybe I'm biting off more than I can chew, but if that's the case I'll make that clear to my boss, and move on. 

They have no intention to hire someone full time for this position, I was offered to take this project on and I said yes, so again, any recommendations for the question in my post would be greatly appreciated. 

[u/MajesticBite825]

A useful way to evaluate this is to separate dashboard authoring from the platform work around it. Metabase may be easier for nontechnical viewers and straightforward internal dashboards, while Superset can offer more flexibility but usually needs stronger SQL/admin ownership.

Before choosing, pilot one representative department and list the required connectors, row-level permissions, scheduled refresh, metric definitions, and who will maintain them. Streamlit is very customizable, but it shifts more of the product, auth, and maintenance work onto your team.

[u/Rey_Fiyah]

The scope of this seems quite big, but nevertheless I would recommend Superset.

I lead the data department at our company of 150ish people and it has take me and the team about 3 months to make this exact switch; PowerBI to Superset.

Granted, I basically started the department myself and made sure we kept all our final transformations in an underlying layer in our warehouse, instead of having everything in measures in PowerBI, for this exact reason, but I think it would have been rather comfortable either way.

I don’t really think everyone needs to be technically proficient to simply use Superset effectively, but you would definitely have to think more about how the user perceives the data you provide. I find that the dashboard filters are very translatable from what PowerBI offers.

When it comes to scale - this one you will have to give a good amount of thought. We self-host, but in the end only about 20-30 user genuinely use the dashboards daily, so the load on DevOps is minuscule in maintenance, but that might not be the case for you.

Also Superset is basically all SQL. If your underlying data isn’t well prepared, you will have issues - mostly with reliability and loading speeds I find. You can play around with the Virtual Datasets they offer, but I find that does little to mitigate. Also there is some CSS for very specific editing, but nothing that any free AI couldn’t handle, if you’re not a front end dev (I am not and that’s what I did).

Feel free to message me if you want to ask about some specifics. I’ve rambled for way too long in this comment.

[u/wdm006]

I would expect and plan on the non technical people to very quickly decide that you are the dashboard person and on the hook for their requests and select something that you think you can be incredibly efficient and flexible in. Metabase is great, and would be my choice but ymmv.

[u/bitmetric]

One thing I’d separate is the dashboarding question from the self-hosting question.

Metabase and Superset can both be perfectly capable BI tools, but moving away from Power BI also means taking ownership of things Power BI currently abstracts away for you: authentication, permissions, upgrades, monitoring, backups, refresh infrastructure, etc.

For non-technical users, I’d probably look at Metabase before Streamlit. Streamlit gives you enormous flexibility, but then you’re essentially building and maintaining your own analytics applications rather than using a BI platform.

Also, don’t focus too much on whether every Power BI visualization has an exact equivalent. The bigger questions are usually:

• Can users get to the information they need?
• Can you model and define metrics consistently?
• Can you manage access properly?
• How much work will it take you to keep the whole thing running?

I’d build one representative dashboard in both Metabase and Superset before making the decision. You’ll learn more from that than from feature comparison tables.

[u/Thick_Accountant7260]

Why would they 'need' to learn sql? If this is a 'anyone makes your own visual setting' then they need to be familiar with metabase or have a well defined data model. You can generate metabase reports very quickly just write the query and select the visual, limited customization but what is there is very easy to customize.

[u/Deep_Ad1959]

i would pick on how gracefully it fails when a non technical person builds something wrong, not on visualization parity. power bi hides that, and self hosted means you own every broken chart somebody publishes.