Metabase is the best-known open-source BI tool, and its free self-hosted edition is genuinely hard to beat on cost. Easy Pivot takes a different angle: spreadsheet-style pivoting over large files, plus dashboards and display walls business users maintain themselves. Here is where each one fits.
Metabase asks you to build a question first and pivot the result. If your team thinks in spreadsheet pivots, that is an extra translation step.
Metabase is built to query warehouses. Teams whose data arrives as big spreadsheets often want to upload the file and start pivoting immediately.
Operations teams often need always-on full-screen dashboards, not just dashboards people open in a tab.
Capabilities that come up most often when teams evaluate this switch.
| Capability | Easy Pivot | Metabase |
|---|---|---|
| Getting started | ||
Authoring tool | Browser | Browser |
Spreadsheet-style pivot table Metabase answers questions through its query builder; pivoting is a visualization applied to a result set. | Drag rows / columns / measures | Pivot is a visualization on a question |
Upload an Excel / CSV file and pivot it | Yes | CSV upload on paid plans |
| Analysis | ||
Visual query builder | Yes | Yes |
Native SQL editor | For advanced cases | SQL-first workflow |
Relational database over JDBC | Yes | Yes |
Cached dataset row limit Both products cache results; the ceiling differs by plan. | 300k rows on the entry plan | Depends on your warehouse |
| Delivery | ||
Dashboards | Yes | Yes |
Large-screen display walls Full-screen NOC-style displays with auto-refresh and rotation. | Yes | Full-screen dashboards, not display-wall oriented |
Scheduled report delivery | Yes | Dashboard subscriptions |
iFrame embedding | Yes | Static embedding is free; interactive embedding is a paid tier |
Row / column-level security | Enterprise plan | Data sandboxing on paid plans |
| Deployment and price | ||
Self-hosted / private deployment Metabase’s open-source edition is free to self-host; Easy Pivot ships private deployment as a paid add-on (Tomcat WAR on your own servers). | Paid add-on | Free open-source edition |
Entry price List prices from each vendor’s public pricing page; Metabase prices cloud plans per user, and its self-hosted edition is free. | From $29/mo for 5 seats | Free self-hosted; paid cloud plans |
Competitor capabilities and list prices checked 2026-09. Vendors change features and pricing — verify against their official documentation before making a decision.
Many teams run both: Metabase for warehouse SQL, Easy Pivot for spreadsheet-heavy pivots and display walls.
Upload the Excel/CSV files your team already maintains as data sources.
Drag the dimensions and measures onto the canvas — no query building step in between.
Pin the charts to a dashboard and put it on a screen with auto-refresh.
No. Easy Pivot is commercial software with a per-seat subscription and an optional private-deployment add-on. If an open-source licence is a hard requirement, Metabase is the better fit.
Yes, and many teams do. A common split is Metabase for warehouse SQL questions and Easy Pivot for the pivots business users build and refresh themselves.
Yes, SQL is available for advanced cases, but the primary workflow is drag-and-drop pivoting — SQL is never required to build a table or chart.
iFrame embedding and SDK integration are available without a separate embedded-analytics tier, unlike Metabase where interactive embedding requires a paid plan.