Holistics vs Metabase

Hey there! Are you considering switching from Metabase to Holistics? If so, you’re probably trying to figure out whether it will be the right decision for you – and we want to help make that process a bit easier.

Scroll down and we’ll share more details to give you an overview of Holistics vs Metabase. You’ll get answers to these questions:

• What can I do in Holistics that I cannot do in Metabase?
• Why pay for Holistics when Metabase is free?

tl;dr - The short pitch

Holistics is better if you do not have a data engineer, but want to do complex analytics work on multiple data sources.

Metabase is better if you are budget-constrained, prefer open-source software and only need to do simple reporting on a single data source but not complex analytics work.

1. Holistics lets your team ask more complex questions

Have your business users ever found Metabase’s “Ask a question” too limiting for complex queries, and end up coming back to the analytics team to ask for custom reports?

Holistics lets your team ask powerful questions, yet with a very simple user interface. We do this by carefully thinking about the intricacies of relational databases, and try to strike a balance between simplicity and complexity for our end users.

2. Holistics supports combining data from multiple sources without additional tooling

Joining data from multiple sources in Metabase is troublesome (and almost impossible). You’ll need to ask your data engineer to write custom scripts to pull data; or you’ll need to buy a separate ETL tool. This costs time and effort, and sometimes a good data engineer to put them together.

Holistics let you pull data from multiple sources into a data warehouse with just a few clicks. You can then join them together to get cross data source insights.

3. Holistics helps you optimize complex transformations

With Metabase, you can only work directly with your database tables because everything in Metabase is designed for simplicity. When you need more complicated logic, it is better to create a view in your database.

With Holistics, you can write complex queries that combine other models, visualize their dependencies and materialize the result of transformations into your database for better performance.

4. Deliver reports to different destinations

Metabase mainly provides a web browsing experience and a simple email template.

Holistics supports automated schedules, and many options for you to share data to different destinations/channels out of the box. Such destinations include email, SFTP, and Google Sheets … among others.

Holistics deliver email reports directly to inbox.