Originally published at devtoolpicks.com
If you read our Metabase vs Grafana vs Superset comparison, you already know where those three land: three legitimate dashboard tools, three different jobs, all free to self-host. This post is different on purpose. It's for the reader who's already decided Metabase specifically isn't working for them, whether that's the row-count ceiling on Metabase Cloud, the SQL-first workflow not fitting a non-technical team, the pace of new AI-driven features, or just wanting to see what else exists before committing further. None of the three picks here are Grafana or Superset. They're three different bets on what a BI tool should be, and one of them comes with a pricing surprise worth knowing before you evaluate it.
Each of these three solves the same underlying problem (turning a database into charts a team can actually look at) from a different starting assumption. Redash assumes you're comfortable writing SQL by hand. Lightdash assumes your metrics already live in dbt. Rill assumes you want the fastest path from a warehouse to a shareable dashboard without either of those prerequisites. Which assumption matches your actual setup matters more than any feature checklist.
Quick Verdict
| Tool | Best For | Price | Rating |
|---|---|---|---|
| Redash | Teams already comfortable self-hosting | Free forever, self-hosted only | 3.5/5 |
| Lightdash | Teams already running dbt | Free self-hosted, Cloud Pro $3,000/mo flat | 3/5 |
| Rill | Solo devs and small teams on a budget | Starter $20/seat/mo, BYO database is free | 4.5/5 |
Redash
Redash is a SQL-first BI tool: write a query, get a chart, drop it on a dashboard, share it with the team. It's been around since 2013, Databricks acquired it in 2020, and it's well-liked by analysts who are comfortable writing their own SQL rather than clicking through a query builder. The connector list is broad, 48 data sources at last count, and the alerting system lets you get notified when a query result crosses a threshold, which is useful for basic operational monitoring without standing up a separate tool for it.
Here's the detail most comparison posts get wrong: Redash does not have a hosted cloud plan anymore. Databricks shut down the hosted Redash service in November 2021. As of 2026, the only way to run Redash is to self-host the open-source project yourself, free forever under the BSD-2-Clause license. The GitHub repo still has 28,600+ stars and the project still ships releases, most recently v26.3.0 in March 2026, but it's community-led at this point rather than backed by a dedicated team, and Redash's own community describes it as being in maintenance mode: stable, but not where new BI feature development is happening. If you're migrating away from Redash entirely, the most common paths people describe are Databricks SQL as the official upgrade route, or a move to Metabase or Superset, which puts an interesting spin on using this post to move away from Metabase in the first place.
That's not automatically a dealbreaker. If you're already comfortable running a Docker container and keeping it patched, Redash costs nothing but the server it runs on, commonly cited around $25 to $40 a month for a small self-hosted instance on something like an EC2 box. But it does mean you're taking on real ops responsibility that Metabase Cloud or Rill's managed plans would otherwise handle for you, and there's no vendor to call when something breaks at 2am.
Who should skip it: if you want a vendor to own uptime, updates, and support, Redash can't offer that anymore at any price. Skip it too if your team needs active new features or native SCIM provisioning for user management, since most of what Redash needed already shipped years ago and development has slowed considerably since the acquisition.
Lightdash
Lightdash takes the opposite approach from Redash: instead of writing raw SQL per chart, it turns an existing dbt project into a governed BI layer, so your metrics and definitions live in dbt as code rather than scattered across dashboard queries. Every metric gets defined once in your dbt models, and Lightdash reads that definition rather than letting each analyst redefine "active user" slightly differently in their own query.
Confirmed from Lightdash's own pricing page: the Open Source edition is free to self-host, with unlimited users and core BI features, support limited to the community Slack and 3-day version history. Cloud Pro is $3,000 a month, hosted by Lightdash, with unlimited seats and explicitly no per-seat pricing, plus AI agents, MCP support, native dbt integration, and a 1-business-day support SLA with 30-day version history. Enterprise is custom, adding SSO, SAML, SCIM 2.0, on-prem or cloud deployment flexibility, SOC 2 with HIPAA and BAA support, and an 8-hour response SLA.
That's the whole pricing ladder: free self-hosted, or $3,000 a month, nothing in between. For a small team, that's a real jump. In a worked example of a 3-person team, Lightdash Cloud Pro works out to $1,000 per person a month, versus $60 a month total on Rill's Starter plan connecting your own database. Lightdash's "unlimited seats, no per-seat pricing" pitch is a genuine advantage once a team is large enough that per-seat pricing would cost more than $3,000 anyway, since at that point every additional analyst is free. But that crossover point is well past solo-founder or small-team territory, and there's no way to test Cloud Pro at a smaller commitment first beyond the 21-day free trial.
Who should skip it: if you don't already have a dbt project, Lightdash has little to offer regardless of price, and adopting dbt purely to get a dashboard tool is a significant workflow change on its own. Skip the Cloud Pro tier specifically unless your team has truly outgrown what a $20 or $30-a-seat tool would cost you, since there's no middle ground to grow into gradually.
Rill
Rill is the newest of the three and the one built with the clearest self-serve, small-team pricing. It combines a SQL-based data modeler, a fast query engine, and a metrics dashboard into one product, with a specific focus on speed on large, high-cardinality datasets, the kind of workload where clicking a filter and waiting several seconds for a dashboard to redraw gets old fast.
Confirmed from Rill's own pricing page: Starter is $20 per seat per month, up to 20 seats and 3 projects, with $250 in usage credit included and Google or Microsoft SSO built in even at this tier. Growth is $30 per seat per month, up to 100 seats and 10 projects, adding embedded analytics (white-labeled dashboards for your own customers, priced separately at $500 a month for up to 100 active embedded seats), custom branding, and 24/7 support with a 6-hour response time. Enterprise is a custom annual license with unlimited seats and projects. Separately from seats, Rill charges for compute and storage only if you use its managed database: $0.15 per compute-unit-hour and $0.10 per GB a month on Starter, rising to $0.20 for both on Growth. Bring your own database instead (Snowflake, ClickHouse, Postgres, and dozens more are supported) and you pay Rill only the seat fee, no additional infrastructure cost at all.
In the same worked example, a 3-person team on Rill's Starter plan connecting their own existing database pays $60 a month total. Add Rill-managed infrastructure for a small project instead, running continuously at a modest 2 compute units, and the total lands closer to $276 a month, still a fraction of Lightdash's flat $3,000. The agentic analytics allowance (1 million AI tokens per seat per month on Starter) is also worth knowing about if natural-language querying is something you'd actually use rather than a checkbox feature.
Who should skip it: if you're already deep in the dbt ecosystem and want your metrics layer defined there, Lightdash's native integration is more purpose-built for that specific workflow. Skip Rill too if you need Redash's simplicity of "just write SQL, get a chart" without touching a modeling layer at all, since Rill's data modeler adds a layer of structure Redash deliberately skips.
Would a Chart Library on Postgres Actually Be Enough?
For a lot of solo indie hacker cases, genuinely yes. If you're already running an admin panel in something like Filament, adding a handful of chart widgets pointed at a read replica of your production database covers most of what a solo founder actually checks day to day: signups this week, MRR trend, churn by plan. You already have the database connection and the auth layer, so the marginal cost of a few charts is small, and you're not introducing a new tool, a new login, or a new place for data to potentially go stale.
What you give up is ad hoc exploration for anyone who isn't comfortable in your codebase, and the sharing and permissions layer that matters once there's a team looking at the same numbers. A BI tool also earns its keep the moment someone non-technical wants to ask a new question of the data without filing a ticket with you to add a chart. If you went through this same tradeoff for analytics tools, the pattern is familiar: DIY wins for a single builder checking their own numbers, a real tool starts earning its cost once more than one person needs access or the questions being asked stop being predictable in advance.
Which Metabase Alternative Should You Actually Use?
For most solo developers and small teams, start with Rill. The $20-a-seat Starter plan is genuinely affordable, and connecting your own database instead of paying for Rill-managed infrastructure keeps the bill close to just the seat cost, with room to add teammates without the price jumping unpredictably. Reach for Lightdash only if you already have a real dbt project and either can self-host it for free or your team is large enough that a flat $3,000 a month beats per-seat pricing elsewhere, since there's genuinely no in-between tier to ease into. Pick Redash if you're already comfortable owning a self-hosted service and specifically want the SQL-first workflow, understanding that you're on your own for uptime and updates going forward, with no vendor fallback if something breaks. And if you're not ready to pay for any of these, a few chart widgets on top of your existing database might genuinely be enough until there's a team to share dashboards with. If you're also evaluating Turso, Neon, and Supabase for where that data actually lives, get that decision settled first, since it affects which of these three connects most easily and which self-hosting tradeoffs you're already comfortable with.
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