Best Open-Source BI Tools 2026: 6 Options Compared

An open-source BI tool lets you keep your dashboards and your queries on infrastructure you control, without a per-viewer licence that grows with every colleague you invite. That is the main reason teams pick one. The cost moves from licence fees to people: someone installs it, upgrades it, secures it and backs up its metadata database. The tools here also differ in how they expect you to work. Metabase and Redash start from a query or a point-and-click question, so analysts get results fast. Apache Superset is closer to a full dashboard studio with a large chart catalogue. Lightdash sits on top of dbt and defines metrics in YAML, and Evidence builds reports from Markdown and SQL, which suits teams that review analytics in pull requests. Grafana is strongest on time-series and operational dashboards, less so for ad hoc business questions. Pay attention to licences, since several of these are open core, with a free core and paid enterprise features such as single sign-on or row-level permissions. If you need those from day one, the open-source edition may not be enough. Start with a read-only database user and a small pilot dashboard before you commit the whole company.

Metabase

The easiest to adopt: a point-and-click question builder that non-analysts can use on top of your database. The core is AGPL and free to self-host with unlimited users, but enterprise features sit in a commercial directory.

Price: Free (Open source edition is free to self-host with unlimited users); paid from $90 per month, Starter cloud billed yearly, first 5 users included (Metabase pricing, checked 2026-10-22).

Platforms and license: Web, Self-hosted. AGPL (core) with commercial enterprise directory (open source) (license source).

Project activity: 49.9k GitHub stars · latest release v0.64.3 (Oct 27, 2026) · last commit Oct 28, 2026

Best for: Teams where non-technical people ask their own questions.

Worth knowing: Starter cloud is $100 per month billed monthly; extra users $6 per month. Pro cloud starts at $517.50 per month billed yearly.

Compare: Metabase alternatives

Apache Superset

Apache-2.0 and community-run, with a broad chart catalogue and support for any SQL database that has a SQLAlchemy dialect. You pay only for your own hosting.

Price: Free (Free open source software; you pay for your own hosting) (Apache Superset pricing, checked 2026-10-22).

Platforms and license: Web, Self-hosted. Apache-2.0 (open source) (license source).

Project activity: 75.3k GitHub stars · latest release 6.1.0 (May 13, 2026) · last commit Oct 27, 2026

Best for: Data teams that want a full dashboard studio.

Worth knowing: Queries any SQL database with a Python DB-API driver and SQLAlchemy dialect, including Snowflake, BigQuery, Redshift, ClickHouse and SQL Server.

Redash

BSD-2-Clause and focused on SQL: write a query, chart it, share it on a dashboard with alerts. The repository lists more than 35 supported data sources, but it does not say whether a hosted service is still sold.

Price: Free (open-source, self-hosted; no paid tier on the repository page) (Redash pricing, checked 2026-10-23).

Platforms and license: Web, Self-hosted. BSD-2-Clause (open source) (license source).

Project activity: 28.9k GitHub stars · latest release v26.9.0 (Sep 24, 2026) · last commit Oct 27, 2026

Best for: Analysts who already work in SQL.

Lightdash

MIT for the core, with an ee directory under a separate license, and built on dbt projects or standalone YAML. Self-hosting is free; Cloud Pro is listed at $3,000 a month, so the open-source edition is the budget route.

Price: Free (open-source self-hosted plan; Cloud has a 21-day trial and no permanent free plan); paid from $3000 per month (Cloud Pro, no per-seat pricing) (Lightdash pricing, checked 2026-10-23).

Platforms and license: Web, Self-hosted. MIT (code under packages/backend/src/ee is under a separate license) (open source) (license source).

Project activity: 6.2k GitHub stars · latest release 3.73.3 (Oct 27, 2026) · last commit Oct 27, 2026

Best for: Teams that already model data in dbt.

Evidence

MIT-licensed framework that builds reports from Markdown and SQL, so analytics lives in code review. Evidence Cloud is $2,500 a month, so the free route is self-hosting, which is aimed at developers rather than business users.

Price: Free (open-source framework for building BI as code; Evidence Cloud has a 30-day trial and no free tier); paid from $2500 per month (Cloud Team, unlimited users) (Evidence pricing, checked 2026-10-23).

Platforms and license: Web, Self-hosted. MIT (open source) (license source).

Project activity: 7.1k GitHub stars · latest release @evidence-dev/evidence@40.1.8 (Feb 6, 2026) · last commit Oct 26, 2026

Best for: Engineers who want BI as code.

Grafana

AGPL-3.0 and the standard for dashboards over metrics, logs and traces, self-hosted for free. It is less suited to ad hoc business reporting; Grafana Cloud's free tier has 3 users and 14-day retention.

Price: Free (10k metric series, 50 GB logs, 50 GB traces, 3 users, 14-day retention); paid from $19 per month platform fee plus usage (Cloud Pro) (Grafana pricing, checked 2026-10-22).

Platforms and license: Web, Self-hosted, Grafana Cloud. AGPL-3.0 (open source) (license source).

Project activity: 77.6k GitHub stars · latest release v13.3.0 (Oct 27, 2026) · last commit Oct 27, 2026

Best for: Operations and monitoring dashboards.

Worth knowing: Self-hosted Grafana is free; Cloud adds hosted Prometheus, Loki, Tempo and IRM (incident response and on-call) with 3 free IRM users.

Compare: Grafana alternatives

Which one to pick

• Business users need to ask questions without writing SQL: Metabase
• Your analysts write SQL all day: Redash
• You want a wide chart library and no vendor: Apache Superset
• Your metrics already live in dbt: Lightdash
• You want dashboards for servers and services: Grafana