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, on top of an OLAP model layer with ROLLUP, CUBE and period-over-period comparison. Metabase has no bring-your-own local LLM, and SSO, data sandboxing and white-labelled embedding sit in its paid editions.
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's notebook editor is the best on-ramp in BI: pick a table, filter, summarise, join, done. It is also where most deployments plateau. Anything involving a grouping set, a running comparison against the same month last year, or a top-N inside each region drops out of the notebook and into hand-written SQL.
From that moment the logic lives in one person's saved question rather than anywhere the organisation can reuse it. Qrly keeps the governed path open further: a star or snowflake model over the connection carries the dimension and measure catalogue, named hierarchies and always-applied model filters as a security boundary, and queries against it get ROLLUP, CUBE and GROUPING SETS, a year to hour time drill, prior-period and prior-year comparison columns, and top-N within group. When you do drop to SQL, the editor converts a flat SELECT back into a visual definition, so the round trip costs you nothing.
A JVM to size and patch, an application database that has to be moved off H2 before anyone will trust it, nginx, SSL rotation, staging clones, backup rotation, upgrade testing, and someone on call the morning a new query pattern puts the instance into a garbage-collection spiral. Someone on your team owns all of that, and their time is not free even if the software is.
None of that shows up on an invoice, which is exactly why it is easy to miss at the point of decision. It shows up as engineering hours instead — and we are not going to put a euro figure on yours, because you know that rate and we do not. What we can say is where the second bill lands: the paid edition you need the moment SAML SSO, data sandboxing or white-labelled embedding turns up on a security review, priced per user on top of the free core. Qrly is priced on revenue, not seats: a €15M-revenue company pays €6,300 a year — €18,900 over three years — for unlimited everything, one organisation, one installation, with all three of those included.
The free Metabase edition is real software, not a demo, and for a team of ten it is often the right answer. What it leaves out is short, predictable, and almost exactly the list a security review produces: SAML and JWT SSO, data sandboxing and row-level permissions, serialisation between development and production, white-labelled embedding without Metabase branding, and official support.
In Qrly none of that is a tier. Signed-JWT embedding, OIDC and LDAP sign-in, model filters applied on every query as a security boundary, verified questions with an audit log, a per-user daily query budget and a query governor all ship in the same deployment as everything else, on the same upgrade schedule, tested as one integrated system before they hit your server.
The free edition is community-supported: a public forum, a public repository, and whatever your own team can work out on a Friday afternoon. For a small internal dashboard that is perfectly reasonable. For a dependency three departments rely on, it is a risk your head of IT already knows they are carrying — and the fix is a paid tier, not a patch.
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, a published support response time 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.
Our own list price in full, and an honest account of what Metabase costs — the free edition and the paid ones. The Qrly column is the published schedule evaluated at €15M of revenue — the number of people using it does not move it.
Methodology, 28 August 2026. Qrly publishes a complete rate card, so the figures in our column are quoted exactly. The other column describes a pricing model rather than quoting a number: vendor list prices change without notice and several of these vendors do not publish one at all. For current figures, go to the vendor’s own pricing page.
Most teams are up and running on Qrly within a working week, pointing at the databases they already query.
Nothing has to be extracted. Qrly connects to the same databases Metabase reads, so the migration is about moving definitions — questions, dashboards and permissions — not about moving data. There is no ETL step, no commercial migration vendor in the middle, and no export window to schedule.
Yes. Qrly keeps what Metabase users genuinely value — self-hosting, control over your own data, and a visual query builder anyone can drive over their existing databases — and adds an OLAP model layer with ROLLUP, CUBE and period-over-period comparison, a signed-JWT embed portal, OIDC and LDAP sign-in, alerts and a four-persona AI layer with BYO LLM. Everything is in the base product: there is no paid edition to unlock SSO, white-labelled embedding or model-level permissions.
Nothing has to be extracted first. Qrly connects to the same databases Metabase already reads, so the move is about definitions rather than data. Native questions come across by pasting the SQL: Qrly reverse-engineers a flat SELECT into a visual definition covering joins, filters, group by, having, order by with NULL ordering and limit/offset, and reports CTEs, UNION and subqueries as explicit lossy-feature warnings instead of dropping them silently. Notebook questions are rebuilt in the visual builder, and Metabase collections map onto Qrly projects and collections.
The Metabase open-source edition is free, and for a small deployment it is genuinely enough. Production is where the cost appears: a JVM to size and patch, an application database to move off H2 and back up, upgrade testing, and the capabilities most companies eventually need — SAML and JWT SSO, data sandboxing, serialisation between environments, white-labelled embedding and vendor support — which live in the paid editions, priced per user on top of the free core. We are not going to attach a euro figure to your engineers’ time, because you know that rate and we do not. Qrly is priced on revenue, not seats: a €15M-revenue company pays €6,300 a year — €18,900 over three years — for unlimited everything, one organisation, one installation. All of the above is included in it.
Metabase extends through database drivers and its REST API, and both have a direct equivalent. Qrly ships 40 connection types — PostgreSQL, MySQL, MariaDB, SQL Server, SQLite, H2, DuckDB, Snowflake, Redshift, BigQuery, ClickHouse, Vertica, Trino, Presto, SingleStore, DB2, Sybase and the managed AWS, Azure and GCP variants — compiled through 12 SQL dialect strategies, so most sources are already covered. There is no Oracle, Teradata, SAP HANA or MongoDB driver, which is worth checking before you commit. Integrations built on the Metabase API map onto Qrly's REST API and webhooks.
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 for the open-source edition, with no asterisk on that. The cost sits in two other places. The first is the engineering time to run, patch and upgrade it, which depends on your team’s rate rather than on any published price, so we will not guess at it. The second is a paid edition, the moment you need SAML or JWT SSO, data sandboxing, serialisation or white-labelled embedding — priced per user on top of the free core, at figures Metabase publishes itself. Qrly is priced on revenue, not seats: a €15M-revenue company pays €6,300 a year — €18,900 over three years — for unlimited everything, one organisation, one installation.
Self-hostable. Flat pricing. Vendor-supported. No paid-edition gates. Made in Belgium.