The two leading open-source analytics projects, compared on the signals that predict whether a dependency survives: commit cadence, release history, licence and health.
Superset is the safer default: actively maintained maintenance, 4656 commits in the last twelve months and a health score of 100/100, against 6108 commits and 100/100 for Metabase. Licence still decides the commercial question — Superset ships under Apache-2.0, Metabase under AGPL-3.0. Both are Analytics projects; the category scores 63/100 on saturation with 38 open-source implementations tracked.
| Metric | Superset | Metabase |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | 74k | 49k |
| Maintenance status | Actively maintained | Actively maintained |
| Commits (12 months) | 4656 | 6108 |
| Commits (3 months) | 1965 | 1665 |
| Active months / 12 | 12 | 12 |
| Last commit | 2026-08-15 | 2026-08-14 |
| Last release | 2026-08-13 | 2026-07-29 |
| Licence | Apache-2.0 | AGPL-3.0 |
| Licence family | permissive | copyleft |
| Health score | 100/100 | 100/100 |
| Replaces | PowerBI, Tableau, Mode Analytics | Tableau, Power BI, DataStudio, Business intelligence |
| Repository | apache/superset | metabase/metabase |
Repository metadata refreshed August 2026. Stars never decay — read the maintenance rows first.
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On maintenance signals, Superset leads: 4656 commits in the last twelve months across 12 active months, versus 6108 commits and 12 active months for Metabase. Star counts (74k vs 49k) reflect historical popularity, not current health, so read them second.
Superset is licensed under Apache-2.0 (permissive) and Metabase under AGPL-3.0 (copyleft). Permissive licences (MIT, Apache, BSD) allow closed commercial products. Copyleft (GPL) triggers on distribution and AGPL triggers on network use, which covers SaaS. Source-available licences usually forbid competing hosted services outright.
Metabase is marked actively maintained with its last commit recorded 2026-08-14 and 1665 commits in the last three months. It still qualifies as having momentum, so it is a viable dependency.
The Analytics category is rated crowded at 63/100, with 18 maintained implementations. In a crowded category every prospect can find a free version in minutes, so your wedge has to be something maintainers structurally will not build: compliance, SLAs, managed scale or a workflow they reject.
Communication
Software Development
Miscellaneous
Media Streaming
File Transfer
Content Management Systems (CMS)
Money, Budgeting & Management
Document Management
Two maintained free tools already own this category. IdeaProof scores your idea against live competitors, market size and 1,000+ documented failures in about two minutes.
Validate your idea freeSearch this database by category and by the commercial product you would replace. It covers 1665 projects across 130 categories, each mapped to the paid tool it substitutes. If your category shows a "Crowded" verdict, a maintained free version almost certainly exists and your positioning has to account for it.
No. It means free is your price anchor. Plenty of large companies were built next to a good open-source project — the ones that failed were the ones selling the same job at a price the free tool made indefensible. Find the part of the job the project deliberately does not do, and sell that.
Each category gets a 0–100 score built from three inputs: how many implementations exist, what share of them are still actively maintained, and how far ahead the leading project is compared with the category median. 62+ is Crowded, 38–61 Contested, under 38 Open. 11 categories are Crowded and 88 are Open.