Best Open Source replacements for Business Intelligence Tools Power BI, Tableau, Looker, MicroStrategy

Albert Wong
4 min readNov 13, 2023

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Best Open Source replacements for Business Intelligence Tools Power BI, Tableau, Looker, MicroStrategy

There are the top 4 open source replacements for Microsoft Power BI, Tableau, Looker, MicroStrategy and other Business Intelligence and Data Visualization Tools.

  1. Apache SuperSet
  2. Metabase
  3. Lightdash
  4. Streamlit

Apache Superset is a modern, open-source data exploration and data visualization platform. It is designed to be fast, lightweight, and easy to use, making it a good choice for users of all skill levels, from data analysts to business executives.

Superset provides a variety of features for data exploration and visualization, including:

  • A powerful SQL editor for querying data from a variety of sources, including relational databases, data lakes, and cloud storage platforms.
  • A drag-and-drop interface for creating charts and dashboards.
  • A variety of built-in chart types, including line charts, bar charts, pie charts, and geospatial charts.
  • The ability to create custom charts and dashboards using Python.

Superset also provides a number of features that make it easy to share and collaborate on data insights, including:

  • The ability to publish charts and dashboards to a web server.
  • The ability to export charts and dashboards to PDF, CSV, and other formats.
  • The ability to create teams and roles to control access to data and insights.

Superset is a popular choice for data exploration and visualization because it is easy to use, powerful, and flexible. Read more about Apache Superset at http://superset.apache.org

Metabase is an open-source business intelligence platform that helps you and your team make better decisions with data. It’s easy to use, powerful, and flexible.

Here are some of the things you can do with Metabase:

  • Ask questions about your data without writing SQL.
  • Create beautiful visualizations of your data.
  • Share your insights with others with interactive dashboards.
  • Collaborate on data analysis with your team.

Metabase is used by companies of all sizes, from startups to Fortune 500 companies. Read more about Metabase at http://metabase.com

Lightdash is an open-source business intelligence platform that makes data exploration and analytics accessible to everyone. It is built on top of dbt, a popular data transformation tool, and provides a variety of features to help users make better decisions with their data.

Some of the key features of Lightdash include:

  • Self-service data exploration: Lightdash allows users to explore their data without writing any SQL.
  • Powerful data visualization: Lightdash provides a variety of built-in charts and dashboards, as well as the ability to create custom visualizations.
  • Collaboration and sharing: Lightdash makes it easy to share data and insights with others.
  • Security and governance: Lightdash provides a variety of features to help organizations keep their data secure and governed.

Read more about Lightdash at http://lightdash.com

Streamlit is an open-source Python library that makes it easy to create and share beautiful, custom web apps for machine learning and data science. In just a few minutes you can build and deploy powerful data apps.

Streamlit is built on top of the Python programming language and uses a number of popular Python libraries, such as NumPy, Pandas, and Matplotlib. This makes it easy for Python developers to get started with Streamlit and to create powerful data apps.

Streamlit provides a number of features that make it easy to create and share data apps, including:

  • Interactive widgets: Streamlit provides a variety of interactive widgets that can be used to create user interfaces for data apps. These widgets include buttons, sliders, text boxes, and drop-down menus.
  • Data visualization: Streamlit provides a variety of built-in charts and dashboards that can be used to visualize data. Streamlit also supports custom visualizations using Plotly and other Python libraries.
  • Deployment: Streamlit makes it easy to deploy data apps to the web. Streamlit apps can be deployed to a variety of hosting providers, including Heroku, AWS Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS), and Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE).

Read more about Streamlit at http://streamlit.io

Of course you’ll need to pair these Business Intelligence Tools with an OLAP database. I recommend StarRocks.

StarRocks is a next-generation, massively parallel processing (MPP) database designed to make real-time analytics easy for enterprises. It is built to power sub-second queries at scale, making it ideal for a wide range of use cases, including user-facing analytics, real-time dashboards, ad hoc querying, and machine learning models.

StarRocks offers a number of advantages over other databases for real-time analytics, including:

  • High concurrency: StarRocks can handle a large number of concurrent users without sacrificing performance.
  • Real-time insights: StarRocks can provide real-time insights into data by using a variety of techniques, such as incremental aggregation and materialized views.
  • Fresh mutable data: StarRocks can handle fresh mutable data, which is data that is constantly changing.
  • Efficient resource isolation: StarRocks can efficiently isolate resources so that different users do not interfere with each other’s queries.
  • Ease of use: StarRocks is easy to use and administer. It provides a variety of tools and features to make it easy to get started and to manage your cluster.

It is used by AirBnB to replace their Apache Druid, Clickhouse and Trino environments. Read more about StarRocks and the Apache Druid, Clickhouse and Trino replacement use case at http://starrocks.io

StarRocks, a Linux Foundation project, is a next-generation sub-second MPP OLAP database for full analytics scenarios, including multi-dimensional analytics, real-time analytics, and ad-hoc queries. StarRocks received InfoWorld’s 2023 BOSSIE Award for best open source software.

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Albert Wong
Albert Wong

Written by Albert Wong

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