head to head · open source
Metabase vs datalens
Metabase has 50,114 GitHub stars, 6,968 forks, 4,346 open issues and last shipped yesterday. datalens has 1,708 stars, 119 forks, 53 open issues and last shipped 2 months ago. Metabase leads on adoption by 2,834% (50,114 vs 1,708 stars). Metabase is written in Clojure under a custom or non-standard licence; datalens is written in PLpgSQL under Apache-2.0. Metabase has attracted 14% as many forks as stars, datalens 7%. Metabase was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 3 topic tags (analytics, bi, business-intelligence), so they are genuine substitutes rather than adjacent tools.
Two open source projects, one decision. Both are free and self-hostable — the differences are community size, license terms, language stack and release pace.
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Side by side
| Metabase | datalens | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 50K | ★ 1.7K |
| License | Custom / other | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Clojure | PLpgSQL |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-08-24 |
| Forks | ⑂ 7.0K | ⑂ 119 |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick Metabase if
- You weight community size — 50K stars and counting
- You want the Custom / other license terms
- Your stack matches Clojure
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick datalens if
- You want the datalens feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches PLpgSQL
- You evaluated both and datalens fits your workflow better
About Metabase
Metabase Metabase is the easy, open source way for everyone in your company to ask questions and learn from data. Get started The easiest way to get started with Metabase is to sign up for a free trial of Metabase Cloud. You get expert support, backups, upgrades, an SMTP server, SSL certificate, SoC2 Type 2 security auditing, and more (plus your money goes toward improving a major open source project). Check out our quick overview of cloud vs self hosting. If you need to, you can always switch to self hosting Metabase at any time (or vice versa). Key Features Set up in five minutes (we're not kidding), or have…
read the full Metabase overview →
About datalens
DataLens · DataLens is a modern business intelligence and data visualization system. It was developed and extensively used as a primary BI tool in Yandex and is also available as a part of Yandex Cloud platform. See also our roadmap, releases notes and community in telegram. Getting started Installing Docker DataLens requires Docker to be installed. Follow these instructions depending on the platform you use: macOS Linux Windows Note about Docker Compose: The new Docker Compose plugin is available as the docker compose v2 package on Ubuntu 20.04/22.04/24.04 from the base APT repository. The minimal…
read the full datalens overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Metabase or datalens more popular?
Metabase has 50,114 GitHub stars and datalens has 1,708. Metabase has the larger community by that measure.
Are Metabase and datalens free?
Both are open source. Metabase has no licence declared in this registry, and datalens is licensed under Apache-2.0. Both are free to self-host.
What is the difference between Metabase and datalens?
Metabase is written in Clojure and datalens in PLpgSQL. The practical differences are community size, licence terms, language stack and release cadence — all compared in the table above.
Which should I choose, Metabase or datalens?
Choose Metabase if you want the larger community (50,114 stars) or its Custom / other licence terms. Choose datalens if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.