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Metabase is the tool you hand to people who will never write SQL: a visual question builder, friendly dashboards, embedding, and an official ClickHouse driver, free to self-host under AGPL. If the goal is company-wide self-serve BI, Metabase is the better fit and this page will not pretend otherwise. CH-UI is built for the other side of the same table: the data and platform engineers who run ClickHouse: SQL-first workspace, ingestion pipelines, dbt-style models, cluster health, query-log analytics, and cost showback that BI tools do not attempt.
| Metabase | CH-UI | |
|---|---|---|
| Primary audience | Business users and analysts across the whole company: self-serve BI. | The team that runs and develops on ClickHouse: engineers and SQL-first analysts. |
| Deployment | Self-host the JVM app (JAR/Docker; a production app database like Postgres is recommended) or use Metabase Cloud. | One binary, state in local SQLite, no external services. Docker and Helm available. Self-hosted only. |
| ClickHouse support | Official ClickHouse driver, community-maintained with ClickHouse, now shipped in the main Metabase repo. Solid for querying; ClickHouse is one of 20+ supported sources. | ClickHouse is the whole product: native client, system-table integrations, ClickHouse error parsing. |
| Querying | Visual question builder plus a capable native SQL editor with variables. | SQL-first workspace: streaming results, filters, automatic history, jump-to-error, Ask AI (Pro). |
| Dashboards | Excellent: interactive filters, drill-through, subscriptions, static and interactive embedding. The stronger pure-BI experience. | Solid dashboards with public share links and alerting, built for engineering visibility, not embedded customer-facing BI. |
| ClickHouse operations | None. Metabase reads your data, it does not manage or monitor ClickHouse. | Cluster Health, Query Insights, and Cost Center (Pro) built on system tables. |
| Ingestion & modeling | Models/semantic layer for BI curation; no data ingestion, so data must already be in the warehouse. | Pipelines (Kafka, S3, webhooks, databases) and dbt-style SQL models with schedules, plus GitHub sync (Pro). |
| AI | Metabot AI features are part of paid plans. | Brain copilot in core with your own provider key; Ask AI in the editor (Pro). |
| Governance & SSO | Row/column-level permissions, sandboxing, SSO, on Pro/Enterprise plans. | Roles, immutable audit log, governance catalog and guardrails, SSO/OIDC (Pro). Query permissions stay with ClickHouse grants. |
| Licensing & price | Open Source free (AGPL). Starter cloud from $100/month + $6 per user; Pro (cloud or self-hosted) from $575/month + $12 per user; Enterprise from about $20,000/year. | Core free (Apache-2.0). Pro $1,199/year flat per instance, unlimited users, offline license activation. |
Questions
Yes. The ClickHouse driver is official (it was developed with ClickHouse and now ships in the main Metabase repository) and works in both self-hosted and cloud Metabase. For BI-style querying and dashboards on ClickHouse data it is a solid choice.
No, and pairing them is a sensible architecture: CH-UI for the engineers running ClickHouse (ingestion, modeling, monitoring, cost) and Metabase for company-wide self-serve dashboards on the resulting tables. They read the same database and do not interfere.
Metabase Open Source is AGPL and free with unlimited users; it includes the question builder and dashboards but not SSO or row-level permissions. CH-UI core is Apache-2.0 and free with unlimited users; it includes the SQL workspace, dashboards, pipelines, models, Brain AI chat, and the OTel log explorer, with Pro adding governance, monitoring, cost, and SSO.
Metabase Pro is $575/month (about $6,210/year) plus $12 per user per month beyond the first ten, self-hosted or cloud. CH-UI Pro is $1,199/year flat per instance with no per-user charge, activated offline with a signed license file.
Self-host the Apache-2.0 core for free, or start a 30-day Pro trial: no card, no sales call, license delivered by email.
