All Guides

What is Metabase? A Guide for Developers

What is Metabase? A Guide for Developers Metabase is an open-source business intelligence (BI) and analytics platform that lets developers deploy a fu...

Getting Started📖 7 min read

How to Deploy Metabase in Under 10 Minutes

How to Deploy Metabase in Under 10 Minutes Metabase can be running and connected to a database in under 10 minutes using Docker. This guide covers the...

Getting Started📖 8 min read

Running Metabase with Docker - A Step-by-Step Guide

Running Metabase with Docker: A Step-by-Step Guide Docker is the standard way to run Metabase in both development and production. Metabase publishes a...

Getting Started📖 7 min read

Metabase Cloud vs. Self-Hosted - How to Choose

Metabase Cloud vs. Self-Hosted: How to Choose The choice between Metabase Cloud and self-hosted Metabase comes down to three variables: how much opera...

Getting Started📖 9 min read

Connecting Your First Database to Metabase

Connecting Your First Database to Metabase Metabase works by connecting directly to your database and running queries against it at runtime. It does n...

Embedding Analytics📖 11 min read

Embedded Analytics - The Developer's Complete Guide

Embedded Analytics: The Developer's Complete Guide Embedded analytics is the practice of integrating data visualizations, dashboards, and reports dire...

Embedding Analytics📖 9 min read

How to Embed a Metabase Dashboard in Your Web App

How to Embed a Metabase Dashboard in Your Web App Embedding a Metabase dashboard in a web application requires three things: a Metabase instance with...

Embedding Analytics📖 10 min read

Multi-Tenant Embedded Analytics - Showing Each Customer Their Own Data

Multi-Tenant Embedded Analytics: Showing Each Customer Their Own Data Multi-tenant embedded analytics is the pattern of embedding a single Metabase da...

Embedding Analytics📖 7 min read

Signed Embedding vs. Public Embedding in Metabase

Signed Embedding vs. Public Embedding in Metabase Metabase offers two embedding modes: public embedding, which makes a dashboard accessible to anyone...

Embedding Analytics📖 7 min read

How to Whitelabel Metabase for Your SaaS Product

How to Whitelabel Metabase for Your SaaS Product Whitelabeling Metabase means removing or replacing Metabase's own branding — the logo, color scheme,...

Security & Auth📖 9 min read

Row-Level Security for Embedded Dashboards

Row-Level Security for Embedded Dashboards Row-level security (RLS) in Metabase — implemented through a feature called data sandboxing — restricts whi...

Embedding Analytics📖 9 min read

Embedding Metabase in a React App

Embedding Metabase in a React App Embedding Metabase in a React application involves two parts: a server-side API route that generates a signed JWT em...

Developer Tooling & API📖 9 min read

Passing Parameters to Embedded Dashboards Dynamically

Passing Parameters to Embedded Dashboards Dynamically In Metabase embedded analytics, parameters are values passed from your host application into an...

Developer Tooling & API📖 9 min read

The Metabase API - A Developer's Reference Guide

The Metabase API: A Developer's Reference Guide The Metabase API is a REST API that exposes nearly every administrative and analytical operation avail...

Developer Tooling & API📖 8 min read

Automating Dashboard Creation with the Metabase API

Automating Dashboard Creation with the Metabase API Automating dashboard creation with the Metabase API means writing code that creates questions, ass...

Developer Tooling & API📖 9 min read

How to Provision Metabase Users and Permissions Programmatically

How to Provision Metabase Users and Permissions Programmatically Provisioning Metabase users and permissions programmatically means using the Metabase...

Deployment & Infrastructure📖 8 min read

Managing Metabase as Code - A GitOps Approach

Managing Metabase as Code: A GitOps Approach Managing Metabase as code means storing your Metabase configuration — dashboards, questions, collections,...

Deployment & Infrastructure📖 8 min read

CI/CD for Metabase - Testing and Deploying Dashboard Changes

CI/CD for Metabase: Testing and Deploying Dashboard Changes CI/CD for Metabase means applying the same continuous integration and delivery practices u...

Deployment & Infrastructure📖 9 min read

Deploying Metabase on AWS - A Production-Ready Guide

Deploying Metabase on AWS: A Production-Ready Guide Deploying Metabase on AWS in production means running the application container on a managed compu...

Deployment & Infrastructure📖 7 min read

Running Metabase on Kubernetes

Running Metabase on Kubernetes Running Metabase on Kubernetes means deploying it as a Deployment with a single replica, backed by an external PostgreS...

Deployment & Infrastructure📖 8 min read

Metabase Environment Setup - Dev, Staging, and Production

Metabase Environment Setup: Dev, Staging, and Production A proper Metabase environment strategy runs three separate instances — development, staging,...

Deployment & Infrastructure📖 8 min read

How to Configure Metabase for High Availability

How to Configure Metabase for High Availability High availability for Metabase means the application continues serving requests during infrastructure...

Deployment & Infrastructure📖 8 min read

Backing Up and Restoring Your Metabase Instance

Backing Up and Restoring Your Metabase Instance Backing up Metabase means backing up its application database — the PostgreSQL (or MySQL) instance tha...

Security & Auth📖 10 min read

Setting Up SSO in Metabase - SAML, LDAP, and JWT

Setting Up SSO in Metabase: SAML, LDAP, and JWT Single sign-on (SSO) in Metabase allows users to authenticate using their existing identity provider —...

Security & Auth📖 9 min read

Role-Based Access Control in Metabase - A Developer's Guide

Role-Based Access Control in Metabase: A Developer's Guide Role-based access control (RBAC) in Metabase is implemented through permission groups — nam...

Security & Auth📖 9 min read

Data Sandboxing - Restricting Row-Level Access by User

Data Sandboxing: Restricting Row-Level Access by User Data sandboxing in Metabase is a row-level security mechanism that automatically restricts which...

Security & Auth📖 8 min read

Audit Logging and Compliance in Metabase

Audit Logging and Compliance in Metabase Metabase's audit logging feature records a tamper-evident log of every significant action taken in the system...

Security & Auth📖 13 min read

Securing Your Metabase Deployment - A Security Checklist

Securing Your Metabase Deployment: A Security Checklist Securing a Metabase deployment means locking down five layers: network access, authentication,...

Performance & Scale📖 9 min read

Optimizing Metabase Query Performance for Large Datasets

Optimizing Metabase Query Performance for Large Datasets Query performance in Metabase is almost entirely determined by the performance of your underl...

Performance & Scale📖 9 min read

Caching Strategies for Fast Dashboards at Scale

Caching Strategies for Fast Dashboards at Scale Metabase's caching layer stores the results of executed queries so that subsequent requests for the sa...

Performance & Scale📖 9 min read

Connecting Metabase to a Data Warehouse (Snowflake, BigQuery, Redshift)

Connecting Metabase to a Data Warehouse (Snowflake, BigQuery, Redshift) Connecting Metabase to a data warehouse — Snowflake, BigQuery, or Amazon Redsh...

Performance & Scale📖 8 min read

Scaling Metabase to 1,000+ Users

Scaling Metabase to 1,000+ Users Scaling Metabase to 1,000 or more concurrent users is primarily a database scaling problem, not a Metabase applicatio...

Build vs. Buy📖 9 min read

Build vs. Buy - Why Developers Choose Metabase Over Rolling Their Own

Build vs. Buy: Why Developers Choose Metabase Over Rolling Their Own When a development team needs to add analytics to a product, they face a fundamen...

Build vs. Buy📖 9 min read

Metabase vs. Embedding a Charting Library - A Technical Comparison

Metabase vs. Embedding a Charting Library: A Technical Comparison Choosing between Metabase and a charting library (Recharts, Chart.js, D3, Highcharts...

Build vs. Buy📖 9 min read

The True Cost of Building Analytics In-House

The True Cost of Building Analytics In-House The true cost of building analytics in-house is almost always underestimated at the outset, because initi...