Business intelligence and analytics dashboards

A business intelligence dashboard connects to a company's own data, usually a database, a spreadsheet export or a data warehouse, and turns it into charts, tables and reports that update on a schedule. It is built for a team or a whole company to read, not for one person's daily glance. That puts it in a different category from a personal dashboard, which shows small pieces of one person's own day rather than a business's sales, revenue or usage numbers.

This fits a team that already has data sitting in a database or warehouse and needs a shared way to query and chart it, whether that is a product team watching usage, a finance team building a monthly report, or an analyst answering ad hoc questions with SQL. It does not fit someone looking for a single glanceable screen of small personal widgets; that need sits in personal dashboards or start pages instead.

The first real fork is self-hosted against hosted. Apache Superset and tools like Metabase and Redash run on your own servers, free to install, with the underlying code open for anyone to read and modify. Hosted platforms such as Data Studio (formerly Looker Studio), Power BI and Tableau remove the work of running a server, patching it and keeping it backed up. Each has a free starting point, and their paid tiers charge a recurring fee per user.

The second fork is how deep a query layer you need. Cube and Lightdash sit closer to developers, defining a data model in code that other tools then query, while Metabase and Superset are built for someone to click through charts without writing SQL first. Evidence takes a third approach, building reports from Markdown and SQL files that live in version control rather than a drag-and-drop editor.

Pricing structures vary as much as the tools do. Metabase and Lightdash are open core: the self-hosted version is free, and a paid cloud or enterprise tier adds hosting, support or extra permissions on top. Superset has no paid tier of its own, though a separate company, Preset, sells a hosted version. Tableau and Power BI have no free server you can run yourself. Their free options stop at a desktop app or reports you do not share, and sharing takes a per-user monthly fee.

If you need a handful of small personal widgets rather than a shared company reporting layer, see personal dashboards instead. For infrastructure metrics and uptime rather than business data, monitoring and observability is the closer fit.