head to head · open source
Metabase vs rill
Metabase has 49,312 GitHub stars, 6,824 forks, 4,346 open issues and last shipped yesterday. rill has 2,893 stars, 201 forks, 211 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Metabase leads on adoption by 1,605% (49,312 vs 2,893 stars). Metabase is written in Clojure under a custom or non-standard licence; rill is written in Go under Apache-2.0. Metabase has attracted 14% as many forks as stars, rill 7%. Metabase was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 4 topic tags (bi, data, 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 | rill | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 49K | ★ 2.9K |
| License | Custom / other | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Clojure | Go |
| Last push | 2026-09-17 | 2026-09-17 |
| Forks | ⑂ 6.8K | ⑂ 201 |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick Metabase if
- You weight community size — 49K 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 rill if
- You want the rill feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You evaluated both and rill fits your workflow better
About Metabase
Metabase is an open source business intelligence and embedded analytics tool, written in Clojure, that lets everyone in a company ask questions of their data and build dashboards without needing to know SQL.
read the full Metabase overview →
About rill
Rill is a Go business intelligence tool in the Data & Analytics / Business Intelligence & Reporting ecosystem, released under the Apache 2.0 license. It is agent first and human friendly, and it is powered by OLAP engines such as ClickHouse and DuckDB.
More in Data & Analytics
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Frequently asked questions
Is Metabase or rill more popular?
Metabase has 49,312 GitHub stars and rill has 2,893. Metabase has the larger community by that measure.
Are Metabase and rill free?
Both are open source. Metabase has no licence declared in this registry, and rill is licensed under Apache-2.0. Both are free to self-host.
What is the difference between Metabase and rill?
Metabase is written in Clojure and rill in Go. 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 rill?
Choose Metabase if you want the larger community (49,312 stars) or its Custom / other licence terms. Choose rill if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.