Managed hosting from
£45/month +VAT
Medium resource profile: 2 vCPU, 4 GB RAM, 20 GB SSD storage. Typically suits organisations giving dozens of staff dashboards and self-serve reporting. Deployment, upgrades, daily backups, monitoring, SSL and UK hosting included, with no per-user fees. How our pricing works
Business intelligence without the per-seat bill
Tableau, Power BI and Looker all charge by the seat, so the cost of a data-driven culture scales with every person you let look at a dashboard. Metabase is the open source alternative: dashboards, self-serve questions and scheduled reports that the whole company can use, running on infrastructure you control. Node deploys, manages and supports Metabase as a production service hosted in the UK, with one flat fee however many people log in.
What Metabase is
Metabase is an open source business intelligence platform built around a simple idea: anyone in the business should be able to ask a question of the data and get an answer without waiting for an analyst. Its question builder lets non-technical staff filter, group and chart data through a point-and-click interface, while analysts get a full SQL editor with variables, snippets and saved queries for anything more demanding.
Questions become dashboards, dashboards get filters and drill-downs, and anything can be scheduled: a daily sales summary emailed to the leadership team, a weekly pipeline report posted to a channel, an alert that fires when a number crosses a threshold. Permissions control who sees which data sources, collections keep content organised, and the whole thing runs in a browser with nothing to install on anyone's machine.
Metabase connects directly to your databases rather than ingesting copies of your data, so reports always reflect what is actually in PostgreSQL, MySQL, SQL Server, MongoDB and the many other sources it supports. It is genuinely open source, which is exactly why Node can run it for you on UK infrastructure rather than routing your business data through a vendor's cloud.
Why self-hosted Metabase instead of Tableau, Power BI or Looker
No per-seat licences: the big BI vendors charge per user per month, and viewer licences are where the bill quietly grows. Every new starter, every stakeholder, every "can I get access to that dashboard" adds cost. Self-hosted Metabase has no seat count. Give the whole company access and pay the same flat managed fee.
Your data stays in the UK: cloud BI platforms pull your business data into their infrastructure to serve it back to you. Metabase managed by Node queries your databases in place, on UK infrastructure, so revenue figures, customer records and operational data never transit a third-party analytics cloud.
No feature gating: scheduled reports, alerts, embedding, permissions and the SQL editor are all part of open source Metabase. You are not pushed up a pricing tier to unlock capabilities the product already has.
No lock-in: your questions run against your own databases and your dashboards are definitions, not a proprietary data store. If you ever move on, your data is exactly where it always was, in your own database, in open formats.
Analytics next to the systems it measures: because Node hosts Metabase alongside your other applications, it sits on the same network as the databases it queries. Reports are fast, there is no data pipeline to build, and there is no export of sensitive data to an external tool.
Self-serve answers for the whole company
The economics of per-seat BI push companies to ration access: a handful of licensed analysts become a bottleneck, and everyone else works from stale spreadsheet exports. Flat-priced Metabase removes the rationing. Sales can check pipeline, operations can watch throughput, finance can track debtors, and the leadership team can open one dashboard instead of asking for one, all without a licence conversation.
Questions, not tickets: staff answer their own "how many, how much, since when" questions in the question builder, and analysts spend their time on modelling and the hard problems rather than servicing report requests.
Dashboards that stay current: because Metabase queries live databases, a dashboard is never a snapshot that someone forgot to refresh. Filters and drill-downs let one well-built dashboard serve many teams.
Reports where people work: subscriptions deliver dashboards by email on a schedule, and alerts notify the right people when a metric moves, so the data reaches the business instead of waiting to be looked at.
Reporting across your Node-hosted applications
Most of the applications Node manages, from CRM and helpdesk to invoicing and time tracking, store their data in PostgreSQL or MySQL databases that live in your tenant. Metabase connects to those databases directly, which turns your application stack into a reportable estate: support volumes from your helpdesk, pipeline from your CRM and revenue from your invoicing, side by side on one dashboard, with no exports and no integration project. For event-driven reporting, n8n workflows can act on the same databases Metabase reads.
Keycloak and single sign-on
Every application in a Node tenant joins your own Keycloak realm, so staff sign in once with corporate credentials and use Metabase alongside every other app we run for you. Admins control access centrally: MFA and session policies apply consistently, and a leaver removed from the identity system loses access to Metabase and everything else at the same moment. It is part of how the Node platform is built, not an add-on.
How Node runs Metabase for you
We operate Metabase as a fully managed service, not a server you have to babysit.
Deployment: we deploy Metabase in a production configuration with a dedicated application database, connect it securely to your data sources and set up permissions so teams see the data they should and nothing they should not.
Upgrades and maintenance: Metabase releases frequently. We test and apply upgrades and security patches, and keep your instance current without disrupting scheduled reports and dashboards.
Monitoring and support: we monitor availability, query performance and scheduled job health, and our team is available when a dashboard the business depends on needs attention.
Your infrastructure or ours: hosted on Node's UK infrastructure or deployed into your own environment, on-premises or in your cloud accounts, with the same managed service either way.
The economics of per-seat BI: per-user pricing punishes exactly the behaviour BI is supposed to encourage. The more people who use the data, the more Tableau, Power BI and Looker charge you, so access gets rationed and decisions get made on exports and guesswork. A managed Metabase deployment from Node is a flat, predictable cost whether ten people or two hundred open the dashboards. Give everyone access, pay the same, and keep your business data on UK infrastructure you control. See pricing for how our flat tiers work.
Adoption and community
48k+ GitHub stars Metabase says its platform is trusted by more than 90,000 companies, and its website names organisations including Capital One, Deutsche Telekom and Hugging Face among its users.
“Metabase is the only tool I’ve used where I’ve managed to get non-technical users to actually engage and use to query building tools to answer their own questions.”
Hacker News
“We use Metabase for our B2B SaaS app and it’s worked very well.”
Hacker News
“Metabase is great. It truly is a BI tool.”
Hacker News
Quotes are from public community discussions, linked to their original sources.
Frequently asked questions
Where is our Metabase data hosted?
On Node's UK infrastructure, or in your own environment if you prefer. Either way your analytics data and the databases it queries stay under UK jurisdiction, backed by an Article 28 data processing agreement, with a clear answer to where data is processed and by whom.
Can you migrate us from Tableau, Power BI or Looker?
Yes. We connect Metabase to the same source databases, rebuild your key dashboards and reports, and run both platforms in parallel until your team is confident. Because Metabase queries your databases directly, there is usually no data migration at all, only dashboard rebuilding.
Does Metabase support single sign-on?
Yes. Every application in a Node tenant joins your own Keycloak realm, so staff sign in to Metabase with the same corporate credentials they use everywhere else, with MFA and session policies enforced centrally and access revoked the moment someone leaves.
What does the managed Metabase service include?
Deployment in a production configuration, upgrades and security patching, database connection management, backups, monitoring and support. We also help with data modelling and building your first dashboards so the platform delivers value quickly.
Which databases can Metabase connect to?
Metabase connects to PostgreSQL, MySQL, SQL Server, MongoDB, BigQuery and many other data sources. It can also query the databases behind the other applications Node hosts for you, so your CRM, helpdesk and finance data become reportable without an export step.
Do non-technical staff need to know SQL to use Metabase?
No. Metabase's question builder lets anyone filter, group and summarise data through a point-and-click interface, while analysts can drop into the SQL editor when they need full control. Both kinds of user work from the same governed data sources.
How does Metabase pricing compare with Tableau or Power BI?
Tableau, Power BI and Looker charge per user per month, so cost scales with every viewer you add. Self-hosted Metabase has no per-seat licence. A managed deployment from Node is one flat monthly fee whether ten people or two hundred look at the dashboards.
Talk to us about Metabase.
Drop us a line and our team will discuss your reporting requirements and how a managed Metabase deployment can put dashboards in front of the whole company.
Our heritage
These projects were delivered by Tokyo Digital, acquired by Node in May 2023 and now a wholly owned subsidiary of Node DT Group. The same team builds and runs the Node platform today.