Business intelligence tools (BI tools) are software applications designed to transform your raw data from databases, data warehouses, and spreadsheets into actionable insights.

They do this by:
• Analyzing and summarizing data
• BI tools can identify patterns, trends, and relationships within your data.
• Creating visualizations
• They can present this information in easy-to-understand formats like charts, graphs, and dashboards.
• Providing alerts and notifications
• BI tools can set up alerts to notify you of important changes or emerging trends in your data.
• Facilitating forecasting
• These tools can help you predict future trends based on historical data.

Overall, BI tools empower you to make data-driven decisions by giving you a clear and comprehensive picture of your business performance.

There’s no right or wrong answers here. It will generally depend on your use case, how much you want people to be able to learn from data and run reports on their own without depending on your data team; your preferred data stack, how fast you need to get up and running, your budget, and more.

Again, there’s no “right” answer, but just sayin’ - Metabase is user-friendly to let everyone on your team get real-time insights from data. It works well with all of your datasets and preferred data tools (from data sources, data preparation, and semantic layering tools). It gets up and running in 5 minutes flat. And pricing is suited to all budgets (and you can try it for free).

Teams who have used Tableau, Microsoft’s Power BI, Google’s Looker, Domo, Sisense and other business intelligence platforms in the past now choose Metabase as it lets their business users self-service analytics. User-friendly drag-and-drop data analytics lets people run ad hoc reports on their own and get actionable insights without needing SQL.

No. Metabase lets people ask questions with or without needing to know SQL. The intuitive Query Builder lets non-technical or data savvy people put together analyses with clicks - no SQL necessary. A promise made by many analytics tools, but not always delivered. Analysts and data people who prefer to write SQL can fill their boots in the SQL editor.

Metabase is trusted by over 50,000 companies with their data analytics, from startups who need their first business intelligence tool through to Enterprises.

Metabase open source is the go-to choice for founders and solo-developers to let their teams get answers from data on their own so they’re not running the same reports once a month. Metabase Pro and Enterprise is generally chosen by CTOs, CPOs, Heads of Data who have been there, done that with every other BI platform on the market and need a way to make self-service analytics actually happen.

You’ll have to take our word on this one, but Metabase is even used by several of our competitors (who have asked us not to show their logos, of course). Could we even make that up?

Yes. You can use Metabase for data analysis with Excel or Google Sheets.

Here’s how:
‍
1. Upload CSV data to Metabase - combine spreadsheet data with datasets in connected tables and data warehouses. It’s big data meets little data.
‍
2. Export data - use Metabase to query your data and then export the results directly to Excel or CSV format.
‍
3. Google Sheets Integration - utilize third-party tools like the Metabase integration for Google Sheets to sync query results directly into your spreadsheets.

4. API Access - leverage Metabase’s API to automate data extraction into Excel or Google Sheets for dynamic updates.

5. Scheduled reports - set up scheduled email reports from Metabase, sending query results to your inbox, which can be easily imported into Excel or Google Sheets.

Metabase’s capabilities in uploading data, exporting data, using third-party integrations, and providing API access make it flexible for combining powerful data analysis with familiar spreadsheet tools.

Many large enterprises use BI platforms such as Microsoft PowerBI, Salesforce Tableau, or Google Looker. These BI platforms could be right for your organizations if you are doing complex data modeling and semantic layering and have a dedicated team - and significantly sized budget - to support it.

Metabase on the other hand is the leading open-source analytics platform which has been designed for all business users - not just dedicated data analysts. Data integration is simple and can be done with just the database connection string inside of 5 minutes.

This makes Metabase the default choice for Saas startup co-founders and CTOs who install Metabase on day one to make data usable for everyone in the company to use business data to make decisions.