Metabase VS Directus

Compare Metabase vs Directus and see what are their differences.

Directus

The Modern Data Stack 🐰 β€” Directus is an instant REST+GraphQL API and intuitive no-code data collaboration app for any SQL database. (by directus)
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Metabase Directus
66 206
36,177 25,113
1.5% 2.3%
10.0 9.9
about 18 hours ago 4 days ago
Clojure TypeScript
GNU General Public License v3.0 or later GNU General Public License v3.0 or later
The number of mentions indicates the total number of mentions that we've tracked plus the number of user suggested alternatives.
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.

Metabase

Posts with mentions or reviews of Metabase. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2024-02-27.
  • Blazer: Business Intelligence Made Simple
    4 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 27 Feb 2024
    We've used it for about a year - Blazer is okay if you need a quick SQL query console, but we found it lacking as an actual business intelligence tool. The support for graphs and dashboards is limited, for graphs it requires you to structure the query in an exact way as you can see in the Blazer readme.

    After some research on available alternatives that don't break the bank, we decided to deploy a self-hosted instance of Metabase[0]. This took only a few minutes to set up using their Docker image[1] and it has much better graphing capabilities and you can easily put a custom layout together for dashboards. Upgrading is similarly easy (just redeploy). Also easy to configure: data sources, hiding or changing the data type of a column, G Suite sign-in for our domain. Highly recommend it if you need anything more than Blazer's table output.

    [0]: https://github.com/metabase/metabase

  • Is Tableau Dead?
    3 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 26 Feb 2024
    I've never used Tableau, but heard a lot of hate about it. However, in my previous role, we were big fans of Metabase (https://metabase.com). You can also self-host it, which was a huge win for us.
  • My mental model of Clojure transducers
    2 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 10 Sep 2023
    It seems folks want a working example. Here's one in prod:

    Metabase is a BI tool, backend written mostly in Clojure. Like basically all BI tools they have this intermediate representation language thing so you write the same thing in "MBQL (metabase query language)" and it theoretically becomes same query in like, Postgres and Mongo and whatever. End user does not usually write MBQL, it's a service for the frontend querybuilding UI thing and lots of other frontend UI stuff mainly in usage.

    Whole processing from MBQL -> your SQL or whatever is done via a buncha big-ass transducers. Metabase is not materially faster than other BI tools (because all the other BI tools do something vaguely similar in their langs) but it's pretty comparable speed and the whole thing was materially written by like 5 peeps

    https://github.com/metabase/metabase/blob/master/src/metabas...

    (nb: I used to work for Metabase but currently do not. but open core is open core)

  • Upgrade your Metabase installation immediately
    4 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 21 Jul 2023
    They backported it to v0.45x and those changes don't seem to be included: https://github.com/metabase/metabase/compare/v0.45.4...v0.45...

    aka, It isn't checked in to source control publicly yet. Interesting.

    I tried to "decompile" the jars and loop over the files but it didn't yield much/wasn't clean enough to be of help.

    4 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 21 Jul 2023
    They haven't released the source, and the compiled versions are non-trivial to diff (e.g. there are nondeterministic numbers from the clojure compiler that seem to have changed from one to the other, and .clj files have been removed from the jar).

    The old version has `hash=1bb88f5`, which is a public commit: https://github.com/metabase/metabase/commit/1bb88f5

    4 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 21 Jul 2023
  • Launch HN: Twenty.com (YC S23) – open-source CRM
    15 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 19 Jul 2023
    We are unsure about the right license to use, so this is a great feedback. We had a MIT license one week ago that we know that we cannot hold on long term and we felt we were lying to the community by keeping an MIT license and changing it in one year.

    By using AGPL, we feel it's the right level of restriction. It's the license used by Metabase for example (https://github.com/metabase/metabase) that many companies use internally.

  • Ask HN: Open-Source Self-Hosted No-Code Platforms?
    3 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 13 May 2023
    The solution really depends on what sort of problems you are trying to solve and who your customers are.

    There are a fair few low-code solutions out there for reporting and data visualisation that are great for finance and marketing teams for example. e.g. https://metabase.com/ , https://evidence.dev/

    For multipurpose SMB workflows and organisational processes, I have used n8n in the recent past and found it was quite good and incredibly easy to maintain. https://n8n.io/engineering-resources/

    For enterprise processes I'd go with Camunda (solely based on recommendations and not first hand experience). Although only parts of their platform are OSS https://github.com/camunda

    Bear in mind that some of these are not suitable if you want to build something that competes with them while taking their OSS code. But are perfectly fine otherwise.

  • 916 days of Emacs
    7 projects | /r/emacs | 13 Apr 2023
    Anyway, I have a collection of scripts that merge ActivityWatch data from all my machines and WakaTime exports to a PostgreSQL database which I then query with a project called Metabase. If you're curious, the scripts are in a repository called sqrt-data. I've been playing with this for ~4-5 years already I think.
  • Ask HN: Who is hiring? (April 2023)
    16 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 3 Apr 2023
    Metabase | https://metabase.com | REMOTE | Full-time | Backend, Frontend, Full Stack, and DevOps engineers

    Metabase is open source analytics software that lets anyone in your company rummage around in the databases you have. It connects to a number of databases / data warehouses (BigQuery, Redshift, Snowflake, Postgres, MySQL, etc).

Directus

Posts with mentions or reviews of Directus. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2024-02-22.
  • Form to DB
    6 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 22 Feb 2024
    I don't know, it's something I've wanted many times.

    Recently I discovered https://directus.io/ which comes pretty close and it's open source.

  • Open-Source Headless CMS in 2024
    9 projects | dev.to | 30 Jan 2024
    Directus: The Shape-Shifting Maverick
  • A Year of Self-Hosting: 6 Open-Source Projects That Surprised Me in 2023
    2 projects | dev.to | 19 Dec 2023
    The Backend to Build Anything or Everything | Directus
  • Prismic.io is increasing our price by *1900%* over Christmas
    4 projects | /r/webdev | 8 Dec 2023
    Along those lines, I’ve been happy with Directus as a backend for my little blog.
    4 projects | /r/webdev | 8 Dec 2023
    I using Directus CMS on several projects with pretty complicated flows, api extensions etc. probably there will be some work if you move. I liked Directus is because it's standard SQL I can always move my DB and documents to another solution. I don't use their hosted solution but they have an unlimited offering for $100 / month.
  • Why Is the Django Admin "Ugly"?
    3 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 27 Oct 2023
    It depends on your skillsets, but I'd highly recommend https://directus.io/ especially if you need "slickness" to raise money otherwise try a pyhat stack if you hate javascript.
  • Building a Blog in Django
    12 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 12 Sep 2023
    The admin is extremely unacceptable for anything beyond trivial borderline trivial use cases, and the modifications you'd have to make are just awful especially the more interactive something needs to be. The extremely tight integration between models and the modeladmin is a blessing and curse.

    The people who like Django,also tend to overload it to do everything. This makes sense at small companies. The only place I really see Django at large companies is as an api using DRF or something.

    For internal admins, I've been lobbying to use https://directus.io/ at my company.

  • Show HN: I built a Python web framework from scratch
    4 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 9 Sep 2023
  • I need recommendations for creating an API. Start from scratch, or are there projects I can build from?
    2 projects | /r/webdev | 20 Aug 2023
    I initially looked into CMS's like Strapi and Directus to possibly handle my admin UI + API all at once. I haven't found anything that looks like it can do this yet, but I'd be very happy to be proven wrong. I would prefer it to be based in .NET or Node.js since I am more familiar with those, but there's no reason I couldn't do PHP either.
  • Pros and cons of off-the-shelf solutions for creating a control panel
    6 projects | /r/reactjs | 13 Jul 2023
    - We want a solution that creates CRUD (create, read, update, delete) quickly and requires minimal effort. - We want to be able to create some sort of complex interface if the task requires it. - We make cool, beautiful projects, so we want a visually pleasing solution. - We want the solution to be independent of the language on the back-end, because, for example, we started with PHP, Laravel, but over time node.js, Go appeared in the stack. In short, we want fast, beautiful and custom. We've had time to poke at various off-the-shelf solutions that we've been advised. They're good, but: - they are created specifically for some frameworks / languages like laravel, node.js - they can only generate CRUDs with a rigidly defined structure, where you can't implement or customize anything of your own. - they can't be styled Here's what we've been looking at Control Panels for Laravel: https://demo.backpackforlaravel.com/admin/dashboard Not a very pretty solution in our opinion. And the promo page has nice screenshots, not the demo "well such". https://orchid.software/en/ Not particularly functional, but neatly done https://nova.laravel.com They have a beautiful, but rigidly set strutkrua, you can not create castmon interfaces, stylize them. Just do CRUD and that's it. And it's paid https://filamentphp.com/ Analog to Nova, with essentially the same problems. For node.js: https://adminjs.co Nice promo, and the demo is way behind As standalone dashboards: https://strapi.io/ Very cool, but for other purposes. It's more of an entity builder with an interface and API https://pocketbase.io/ Similarly, it's an entity builder with an interface and API https://directus.io/ This is a backend builder. https://filamentphp.com/It is purely for php, you can't customize styles, you can't create your own interfaces. It is possible to create only tables and forms by template, and we remember that we want flexibility, independence from the language and the ability to create their own interfaces and customize them https://flatlogic.com This is also more of a backend builder. Direct competitors: https://github.com/refinedev/refine https://marmelab.com/react-admin/is probably the best solution that is currently on the market, they have been developing for a long time, they are our favorite. To the disadvantages we considered the following points: quite an old project, and somewhere the technology is already outdated, unsympathetic interface, old UI libraries. Huge documentation, it’s simply to create CRUD but hard to work without immersion. After all this there is only one conclusion: you need to do it yourself....

What are some alternatives?

When comparing Metabase and Directus you can also consider the following projects:

Apache Superset - Apache Superset is a Data Visualization and Data Exploration Platform [Moved to: https://github.com/apache/superset]

supabase - The open source Firebase alternative.

Strapi - πŸš€ Strapi is the leading open-source headless CMS. It’s 100% JavaScript/TypeScript, fully customizable and developer-first.

Appwrite - Build like a team of hundreds_

budibase - Budibase is an open-source low code platform that helps you build internal tools in minutes πŸš€

lightdash - Open source BI for teams that move fast ⚑️

KeystoneJS - The most powerful headless CMS for Node.js β€” built with GraphQL and React

appsmith - Platform to build admin panels, internal tools, and dashboards. Integrates with 25+ databases and any API.

nocodb - πŸ”₯ πŸ”₯ πŸ”₯ Open Source Airtable Alternative

Elasticsearch - Free and Open, Distributed, RESTful Search Engine

superset - Apache Superset is a Data Visualization and Data Exploration Platform