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Apache Superset 1.1 (github.com/apache)
96 points by skadamat on June 8, 2021 | hide | past | favorite | 28 comments


I didn't know this existed. It looks like a good start for an open source product that could end up competing with Business Objects, QlikView, PowerBI etc.

Will follow with interest. Might even contribute.


There’s also Metabase which I’ve found to be significantly more polished and straightforward to run.


I like Metabase a lot, my org has a few people who were very accustomed to the filters in Tableau, so I had to buy some licenses, but Metabase is great, fast, and runs on very low end EC2 instances. Big kudos to the team that works on it.


Although some things in Metabase seem a little too asynchronous, it inspires confidence to see it's written in Clojure! We run it on ECS/Fargate with Aurora Serverless, very tidy deployment.


We use Metabase right now and tried Superset. Took me an hour to figure out how to create a simple set of filters on a dashboard. They renamed things at some point so most online documentation no longer makes sense. Also, having to creating a dummy widget just to filter with is overly complicated I feel. Seems a tool clearly made by engineers for engineers.


Also Redash which I find to be more powerful: https://redash.io/


Isn't redash dead? "Redash has joined Databricks"


No. Did you read the blog post? The commercial business was acquired by Databricks. The project is still open-source and actively developed.


I see commits in github, but there are no releases. 9.0-beta was tagged just before the acquisition and there is still no 9.0 release, which is a bad sign.


https://discuss.redash.io/t/when-are-expecting-redash-v9-sta...

"The V9 beta is stable. It’s been in production on app.redash.io for more than six months."

That was last year. The commit activity is more important than the releases. Main branch works fine for us.


+1 for metabase, I've used it all over the place


Agreed. If you need general "self-serve" reporting that's basically a glorified pivot table aimed at business users, Metabase is top-notch.

If you're an analyst looking for more control and don't foresee business users "self-serving", a tool like Superset has more breadth and allows for greater customization and "wow" factor.

I much prefer Metabase, and so have my non-technical business users that use it daily to pull data. If you design your reports well, a huge amount of value can be extracted with simple filter/group/aggregate pivot table mechanics.


Unfortunately having tried Superset, Domo, Tableau, and others everyone is still far behind Tableau despite the performance of Tableau being utter garbage when you have more than 10k rows. The flexibility in the types of ways you can arrange, color, and label graphs is unmatched. They really get what you need to showcase data effectively whereas everyone else is just a fancier Excel with SQL support.

Given the lack of quality I've seen in certain other big tech company viz tooling, I'm not sure Airbnb will be able to make Superset competitive either.


We moved from Tableau to Looker and it blows me away how much you have to spend to get good performance and a good dev experience.


Could you please be a bit more precise here. What blows you away, Tableau or Looker and in what direction does it blow?

My (somewhat shallow) impressions of tableau is that it was built as an excel 2.0. Including all the bells and whistles. But it was not really tailored to our use-case of visualizing SQL data (without all the bells and whistles).

We had some requirements that does not seem to be supported in superset though. The filters implementation is horrible as mentioned, and the killer feature is to be able to group by a {{variable in a dropdown}}.


I use it for a small side project. I think it wasn't completely straightforward to get started with as mentioned elsewhere but good enough to create dynamic dashboards, manage SQL queries and it provides various abstractions. (And most importantly it helped me understand my data!) Also it doesn't seem to use many resources.


https://preset.io/?

Maybe I'm misunderstanding what you're proposing.


Congrats to the Superset team! The project has been on my radar for a while.

Does anyone know what the current status of embedding dashboards within an application is (given the RBAC PR linked in the release notes)? I'm looking for ways to do some rapid prototyping without sacrificing security to an openly-accessible iframe.


Better off changing the link to https://github.com/apache/superset so that people actually know what it is


I gave it a shot at my company, but we ended up using Redash. The UX for business people was much better on Redash.

We've considered Metabase as well, but the lack of SSO login was a show stopper for us.


Do you mean SAML and/or generic OIDC? We’ve got a Metabase instance authenticating people via Google Workspaces (G Suite).


Metabase’s free version supports Google login and no others — it works okay, but any further login federation requires stepping up to the enterprise version (at least for self-hosted).


SAML. We use Azure AD.


> Apache Superset is a Data Visualization and Data Exploration Platform

Never heard of it before, but it looks very good and has a healthy community of large corporate users.


It's been around for years, it used to be called Caravel.

Played with it for a bit but it was quite clunky. These days for anything serious something like Looker is much nicer.


It's also embedded in a ton of other sw packages, so it gets little attention by itself.


This looks so freaking cool. I have been a big fan of products that originated at AirBnB. It also gives an indication of data centric the organisation is.

Superset is absolutely cool, with minimal operational headaches and it is actually free as compared to popular reporting tools.


Congrats to the Preset team! Superset and Preset are just getting better and better!




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