[huy]

If you’re using Chartio and looking to migrate, here are a few alternatives you can consider. These are mostly cloud-based tool that is SQL-native and sends your written SQL queries to your SQL data-warehouse.

1/ Redash: write SQL gets charts, similar to Chartio (although a bit less polished as it was developed by a small team). Open-source or Cloud-based. Downside is they recently get acquired by Databricks, so I’m not sure how that will affect their product roadmap. Support for Google Sheets as well.

2/ Superset: also write SQL gets charts. They’re both open-source (Apache Incubated), and being supported by a commercial company behind (Preset). Their visualization library looks pretty diverse too.

3/ Metabase: This is also based on SQL. The difference is that they put a simple modeling layer in between your DW and SQL, so that they provide a simple ‘ask question’ interface for business users to get data, it’s quite simple though so if business users want more sophisticated questions they’ll need to resort back to SQL. Their UI is pretty sleek. Both open source and cloud-based (pricing starts from $100) with a commercial company behind.

4/ Holistics: Similar to Metabase, where they provide a modeling layer and self-service capability to non-technical layer. Difference is their modeling layer seems more sophisticated than that of Metabase. They also support the T in ELT as part of modeling. Support for Google Sheets as well. Their UI looks well-polished. Cloud-based only, with pricing starting from $100. They’re also working on Git version-controlling your SQL/modeling code so that it’s easier to track change/audit, this might help prevent vendor lock-in and ease future migration.

5/ Mode: Write SQL gets charts (similar to Redash/Superset). They’re a lot more polished than Redash, with a focus towards doing Data Science (native Python/R support, Notebook, etc). Their Free plan supports up to 5 users, but beyond that you will need to talk to their sales people to get quoted pricing. I heard it can get over $1k/month based with additional user pricing on top.

6/ Looker: probably best in-class in term of SQL-based data modeling, but very expensive.

7/ There are also other tools which I don’t think fit in the SQL-native narrative, like AWS Quicksight, Google Data Studio, PowerBI, Tableau and Qlik.

P/s: These 2 posts give a fairly good framework on how to look/evaluate different BI tools. This is a pretty crowded space with many different paradigms baked in over many years, so it might be a bit confusing for new people looking into the field

- https://www.holistics.io/books/setup-analytics/navigating-th...

- https://www.holistics.io/books/setup-analytics/the-arc-of-ad...