Business intelligence that belongs to your organisation, not your vendor
Commercial BI platforms charge per seat, locking you into escalating costs as your data culture grows. Apache Superset provides enterprise-grade dashboarding, charting and data exploration with no per-user licensing. Your entire organisation can access insights without a procurement conversation. Node deploys Superset as the visualisation layer of your automation platform.
What Superset does and why it matters
Apache Superset is a modern, web-based business intelligence application originally created at Airbnb and now maintained by the Apache Software Foundation. It provides a rich, intuitive interface for creating interactive dashboards, running ad-hoc SQL queries and exploring data visually - capabilities that traditionally required expensive commercial platforms.
Superset connects to virtually any SQL-speaking database and supports over 40 visualisation types out of the box, from standard bar charts and line graphs to geospatial maps, heatmaps, treemaps, sunbursts and custom plugins. Its SQL Lab provides a full-featured query editor for analysts who prefer to work directly with SQL, complete with query history, saved queries and results export.
What makes Superset particularly relevant for modern data teams is its semantic layer. You define business metrics, calculated columns and access controls once, and they apply consistently across every dashboard and query. This eliminates the problem of different teams calculating the same metric differently - revenue, churn, conversion - because the definitions live centrally.
Superset is used in production at Airbnb, Dropbox, Lyft, Netflix, Twitter, Udemy, Nasdaq and hundreds of other organisations. It handles analytics workloads from small teams to enterprise-wide deployments with thousands of users.
How we deploy Superset for business automation
We deploy Superset as the visualisation and reporting layer that sits on top of your entire automation stack. Data processed by Spark appears in dashboards. Kafka streaming metrics surface in real-time charts. Airflow workflow performance is tracked visually. The outputs of AI models - predictions, classifications, anomaly scores - are presented in interactive dashboards that business users can explore without engineering support.
For automated reporting, Superset's alerting and scheduling capabilities push reports directly to stakeholders via email or Slack. Threshold-based alerts trigger when metrics cross defined boundaries, ensuring the right people are informed without anyone needing to watch a dashboard.
Key capabilities we implement
Interactive dashboards - build rich, filterable dashboards with cross-filtering between charts, drill-down capabilities and responsive layouts. Dashboards auto-refresh on configurable intervals and support embedded viewing for integration into internal portals.
40+ visualisation types - display data using line charts, bar charts, pie charts, scatter plots, heatmaps, geospatial maps, pivot tables, treemaps, word clouds, funnel charts and many more. Custom visualisation plugins extend the library further.
SQL Lab - provide analysts with a powerful, browser-based SQL editor featuring autocomplete, query history, saved queries, results visualisation and CSV/Excel export. Analysts explore data independently without waiting for engineering to build reports.
Semantic layer - define business metrics, calculated columns, currency formats and access controls centrally. When someone creates a new dashboard, they select from pre-defined metrics rather than writing raw SQL, ensuring consistency and reducing errors.
Role-based access control - fine-grained permissions at the database, schema, table and row level. Different teams see different data based on their roles, supporting multi-tenancy and data governance requirements. Row-level security ensures that regional managers see only their region's data without maintaining separate datasets.
Alerting and scheduled reports - configure alerts that trigger when SQL query results cross defined thresholds. Schedule dashboard snapshots or query results to be delivered via email or Slack at regular intervals. Replace manual reporting processes with automated delivery.
Database connectivity - connect to PostgreSQL, MySQL, ClickHouse, BigQuery, Snowflake, Redshift, Presto, Trino, Apache Druid, Apache Spark SQL, DuckDB and dozens of other SQL-compatible data sources through SQLAlchemy.
Superset in your automation stack
Superset is the window into everything your automation platform produces. Spark-processed analytics appear in operational dashboards. Kafka streaming metrics surface in real-time monitoring views. Airflow workflow statistics drive performance reporting. AI model outputs and predictions are presented in interactive explorations. With APISIX managing API access and NiFi handling data flows, Superset completes the stack by making everything visible and actionable to the people who need it.
Trusted in production worldwide - Apache Superset was created at Airbnb to replace expensive per-seat BI tools and is now used by thousands of organisations. Dropbox uses it for data exploration across engineering teams, Netflix runs operational dashboards on it, and Nasdaq relies on it for financial analytics. Preset, the commercial company behind Superset, counts hundreds of enterprises among its customers. Node deploys and operates Superset with the same standards these organisations demand.
Talk to us about business intelligence and dashboarding.
Drop us a line, and our team will discuss how Superset can replace expensive BI licensing with a platform your whole organisation can access.