BI + AI in one self-hosted platform — natural-language Ask (NL→SQL) and BYO LLM (local Ollama / LM Studio or Anthropic, Gemini, OpenAI, Azure) included by default. Metabase has a weak AI story, no BYO local LLM and a dated UI — Qrly delivers the modern BI + AI workflow that Metabase-loyalists actually want.
No marketing fluff. Here is where each tool is genuinely stronger.
The features most teams actually evaluate when replacing Metabase.
From real migration conversations with ops leads and infrastructure teams who have run Metabase for years.
Metabase in 2026 still looks like Metabase in 2010. The navigation model, the typography, the dense forms, the filter UI — all from a web era most of your current team never worked in. Everyone who has spent a decade with the tool has internalised where things are, but everyone else has to be taught.
Every new hire needs training on a paradigm they have never seen before they open their first ticket. "This is what we use" is not a hiring advantage anymore — candidates compare it directly to the tools they used at their previous employer and quietly note the gap. Qrly looks and behaves like the modern tools engineers already know, so onboarding takes minutes rather than afternoons, and senior staff stop fielding the same Metabase navigation questions over and over.
Ruby, Passenger or Unicorn, MySQL or Postgres, nginx, SSL rotation, staging clones, backup rotation, upgrade testing, plugin compatibility matrices, the occasional gem security advisory at two in the morning. Someone on your team owns all of that, and their time is not free even if the software is.
For a production 50-user Metabase deployment, the three-year sysadmin cost routinely runs €30,000 to €80,000 in billable hours — before a single commercial plugin license, before the annual hosting bill, before the unplanned weekend when a Rails minor upgrade took a core plugin with it. Qrly's cheapest tier (The Pulse) is a flat €1,875 per year **per tenant**, with unlimited users & projects inside the tenant — €5,625 over three years for a single tenant — that includes vendor support and the upgrade path on the same contract.
The best Metabase plugins are often maintained by a single person in their spare time, and it shows in the release cadence as soon as that person changes jobs or picks up children. The embedded analytics, Alert, agile board and auth plugins — the ones most teams in 2026 actually depend on — are the most fragile precisely because they carry the most complexity.
Critical plugins routinely break during Ruby or Rails upgrades, and your upgrade window suddenly becomes a three-way negotiation between the core release, the plugin maintainer, and your own patience. In Qrly, those same capabilities are first-party features that ship with the product, stay on the same upgrade schedule, and are tested as one integrated system before they hit your server.
A quiet day on the Metabase BI platform does not mean nothing is wrong. It means no one is being paid to fix anything. For a personal project or a small internal tool that is perfectly fine — the community has earned two decades of goodwill. For a dependency that three departments rely on, it is a risk your head of IT already knows they are carrying.
Commercial users want a product roadmap they can plan around, security patches delivered on a predictable schedule, and a phone number to call when something goes sideways during a Friday afternoon deploy. Qrly ships with a named contact, published Alerts and a vendor that is accountable for the software it sells — the simple promise your finance team has been asking you to put in writing.
List prices as of 2026-04. 50-user team, 3-year total cost of ownership.
Most teams are up and running on Qrly within a working week — with journal history intact.
Qrly reads Metabase via its REST API or directly from a SQL dump. There is no third-party ETL step, no commercial migration vendor in the middle, and no manual re-keying of questions for the team to resent.
Yes. Qrly keeps the parts of Metabase that loyalists genuinely value — self-hosting, control over your own data, a solid BI platform, wiki and query budgets — and pairs them with a modern UI, a native embed portal, native Alert enforcement, OIDC, multi-IdP SSO and on-prem AI. It ships as a single binary or container, not a Ruby on Rails deployment you have to keep alive.
Yes. Qrly imports from Metabase via the REST API or a direct SQL export. Issues, journals, attachments, projects, trackers, categories and users are mapped automatically. Journal history is preserved so QQL WAS and CHANGED queries work on day one.
The Metabase software license is free. Running Metabase in production is not. Ruby, Rails, Passenger or Unicorn, MySQL or Postgres, plugin compatibility matrices, version upgrades and backups typically run €30,000 to €80,000 in sysadmin time over three years for a 50-user deployment, plus paid plugins for embedded analytics, agile and auth. The cheapest Qrly tier (The Pulse) is €1,875 per year **per tenant**, with unlimited users & projects inside the tenant — no per-seat fees. Three-year cost (single tenant): €5,625, with a vendor on the other end of the line.
Most teams find that the plugins they depend on — embedded analytics, Alert, agile boards, better auth — are Qrly's core features. For genuinely custom extensions, Qrly exposes a REST API and webhooks so you can rebuild integrations without carrying Ruby plugin code forward through Rails upgrades.
Yes. Self-hosting is first-class. Qrly runs as a single binary or container on any Linux box or Kubernetes cluster. No phone-home, no user minimum, EU data residency by default. Your data stays on your infrastructure — the same promise Metabase has always made.
Metabase software: €0. Realistic 3-year total cost of ownership for 50 users self-hosted: €30,000–€80,000 in sysadmin hours plus roughly €1,100 per year in common paid plugins (embedded analytics, agile, auth). €1,875 per year **per tenant** on the cheapest tier (The Pulse), with unlimited users & projects inside the tenant — €5,625 over three years for a single tenant, with support included.
Self-hostable. Flat pricing. Vendor-supported. No plugin roulette. Made in Belgium.