Open Report › Alternatives › Metabase
Open Report vs Metabase
This one is not a story about escaping a vendor: Metabase is open source, self-hostable and considerably more mature than Open Report, with a large community behind it. If you are weighing the two, the question is not licensing but shape — what a report is meant to look like, and who is meant to build it.
Side by side
| Open Report | Metabase | |
|---|---|---|
| Licence | GNU AGPL-3.0 | AGPL-3.0 for the open source edition |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Project maturity | Young — version 0.x | Mature, widely deployed, large community |
| Report layout | Free canvas: pixel positioning, multi-page, merged frames | Dashboards on a grid |
| Semantic model | Dimensions, measures, joins and row-level security defined once | Models and metrics |
| Scheduled email | PDF of the report, attached | Yes |
| Hosted in Europe | Cloud hosted in France | Cloud regions offered by the vendor |
Where Metabase is stronger
No tool wins everywhere, and a comparison that pretends otherwise is not worth reading.
- Years of production use, a large community, and answers already written for most problems you will hit.
- A much wider range of database connectors.
- A question-asking experience designed for people who do not write SQL, refined over a long time.
- A commercial edition and a support ecosystem for organisations that need one.
Where Open Report fits better
- Reports are composed on a free canvas rather than a grid: multi-page documents, pixel placement, merged frames — closer to a report than to a dashboard.
- Row-level security and custom SQL measures live on the shared model, so every report inherits them.
- Scheduled emails carry the report as a PDF attachment.
- The managed Cloud runs in France, for teams that need European hosting.
Try it yourself
Self-hosting takes one command from a fresh clone — the installer checks your Node version and installs it if needed. Or open the hosted app and skip the server entirely.
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