head to head · open source
Metabase vs dtale
Metabase has 50,141 GitHub stars, 6,978 forks, 4,346 open issues and last shipped yesterday. dtale has 5,237 stars, 448 forks, 71 open issues and last shipped 3 months ago. Metabase leads on adoption by 857% (50,141 vs 5,237 stars). Metabase is written in Clojure under a custom or non-standard licence; dtale is written in TypeScript under LGPL-2.1. Metabase has attracted 14% as many forks as stars, dtale 9%. Metabase was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 2 topic tags (data-analysis, data-visualization), 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 | dtale | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 50K | ★ 5.2K |
| License | Custom / other | LGPL-2.1 |
| Written in | Clojure | TypeScript |
| Last push | 2026-11-03 | 2026-07-24 |
| Forks | ⑂ 7.0K | ⑂ 448 |
| 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 dtale if
- You want the dtale feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the LGPL-2.1 license terms
- Your stack matches TypeScript
- You evaluated both and dtale 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 dtale
Live Demo Animated US COVID 19 Deaths By State 3D Scatter Chart Surface Chart Network Analysis What is it? D Tale is the combination of a Flask back end and a React front end to bring you an easy way to view & analyze Pandas data structures. It integrates seamlessly with ipython notebooks & python/ipython terminals. Currently this tool supports such Pandas objects as DataFrame, Series, MultiIndex, DatetimeIndex & RangeIndex. Origins D Tale was the product of a SAS to Python conversion. What was originally a perl script wrapper on top of SAS's insight function is now a lightweight web client on top of Pandas data…
read the full dtale overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Metabase or dtale more popular?
Metabase has 50,141 GitHub stars and dtale has 5,237. Metabase has the larger community by that measure.
Are Metabase and dtale free?
Both are open source. Metabase has no licence declared in this registry, and dtale is licensed under LGPL-2.1. Both are free to self-host.
What is the difference between Metabase and dtale?
Metabase is written in Clojure and dtale in TypeScript. 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 dtale?
Choose Metabase if you want the larger community (50,141 stars) or its Custom / other licence terms. Choose dtale if its feature set, stack or LGPL-2.1 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.