Domo vs Metabase

Domo is a cloud business intelligence platform founded in 2010 in Utah by Josh James, co-founder of Omniture, and listed on Nasdaq in 2018. It combines data integration, dashboards, low-code apps and AI in one hosted product aimed at business teams, not only analysts. In September 2026 Progress Software completed a $400 million acquisition of Domo's AI and data platform business, so Domo now sits inside Progress's data portfolio.

The platform includes 1,000+ prebuilt connectors, drag-and-drop Magic ETL, Cloud Amplifier for querying Snowflake, BigQuery or Databricks without copying data, charts and dashboards, scheduled reports and alerts, App Studio for low-code data apps, embedded analytics for customer-facing reporting, workflows and AI agents with governed model management. Pricing is credit-based: you buy a pool of credits consumed by storage, data refreshes, workflows and AI, with unlimited users and a 30-day free trial.

Domo fits mid-size and large companies that want one vendor for pipelines and dashboards and value mobile, executive-friendly reporting. Power BI is far cheaper for Microsoft shops, Tableau has deeper visual analytics, and Looker Studio or Metabase cover simpler needs for little or no cost. Credit consumption can be hard to forecast, and independent estimates put typical contracts in the tens of thousands of dollars per year.

Buying tip: because of the Progress acquisition, ask about roadmap, support continuity and contract terms before renewing or signing a multi-year deal, and model credit burn on your real refresh schedules during the trial.

Metabase is the most widely used open-source business intelligence tool, built by a San Francisco-based company founded in 2015. Its core job is to let everyone in a company ask questions of data: non-technical users build queries with a point-and-click builder, analysts write SQL, and teams share the results as dashboards, alerts and scheduled reports.

Metabase connects to Postgres, MySQL, SQL Server, BigQuery, Snowflake, Redshift, Databricks and many other databases. Dashboards support filters, drill-through and cross-filtering, and subscriptions deliver them by email or Slack. Models, metrics and segments create a light semantic layer for governed self-service. Embedding ranges from public links and static embeds to an interactive embedding SDK for React, which lets SaaS products offer customer-facing analytics. The open-source edition is free to self-host under the AGPL license; Metabase Cloud (Starter) adds hosting and upgrades, while Pro and Enterprise add SSO, row and column-level permissions, white labeling, advanced embedding and support. Metabot brings natural language questions into the product.

Metabase fits startups and mid-size companies that want useful dashboards quickly and cheaply, and developers embedding analytics. Visualizations are simpler than Tableau or Power BI, query speed depends on your database, and modeling is lighter than Looker or Lightdash. Apache Superset is the other popular open-source option, with more chart types but a steeper learning curve.