Live data from Hacker News

Apache Superset

superset.apache.org

11–20 of 201 posts

Re: Apache Superset

#11
I love Superset.

I've been running it in production since 2017, at two jobs, the current one a big corporation.

Best general-purpose, database-backed dashboarding system out there. I would never pay for Tableau or PowerBI.

Same for Airflow.

Re: Apache Superset

#12
post #2

> Superset is fast, lightweight, intuitive, and loaded with options that make it easy for users of all skill sets to explore and visualize their data, from simple line charts to highly detailed geospatial charts. I tried Superset a few years back, and maybe it's changed since then, but intuitive is about the last thing I'd use to describe it. Things which I could figure out in a few minutes on any other BI tool liter…

It’s more intuitive than the open source alternatives but is not as intuitive as tableau and others.

Re: Apache Superset

#13
Related. Others?

Open source Business intelligence platform made with Python - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29368664 - Nov 2021 (49 comments)

Apache Superset 1.1 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27439939 - June 2021 (28 comments)

The Apache Software Foundation Announces Apache Superset as a Top-Level Project - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25905277 - Jan 2021 (1 comment)

Apache Superset is an enterprise-ready business intelligence web application - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21133931 - Oct 2019 (7 comments)

Re: Apache Superset

#15
post #7
post #2

> Superset is fast, lightweight, intuitive, and loaded with options that make it easy for users of all skill sets to explore and visualize their data, from simple line charts to highly detailed geospatial charts. I tried Superset a few years back, and maybe it's changed since then, but intuitive is about the last thing I'd use to describe it. Things which I could figure out in a few minutes on any other BI tool liter…

I also found Superset unintuitive to use and setup as well. I settled on standing up Metabase because it was so simple to get started with trying it since it can be launched as a single jar. The business users loved it and so did I and administration with a Postgres backend instead of the internal h2 database was a breeze.

Metabase is great. It truly is a BI tool. Superset is more of a visualization platform, which works great if you have engineers building reports. Less good if you expect more junior analysts to be super productive.

Re: Apache Superset

#16
post #9

Has anyone tried both this and Metabase? I've used Metabase in a few projects and I find it very nice. This seems more powerful, perhaps? Is it worth it for BI on small datasets?

Yes, I am at a company using Metabase, but I have a decent amount of experience with Superset (albeit from many years ago).

The reason we chose Metabase was that it had table joins, while Superset doesn't (unless it has added them since I used it). It also looks a bit sleeker. But I strongly prefer Superset; I found that with Metabase I had to turn a lot of things off to make it usable (Let me see "the_table" not "The Table"!), I was constantly annoyed at the opacity around models vs "questions", etc. and every time I wanted to change a question Metabase insisted on creating a new one instead. The real issue here was when we wanted to swap out the data source for a lot of questions but there was no clean way to do so without MB just creating new questions.

Also, Metabase doesn't have serialization unless you pay them AND you self-host, (if I'm self hosting then what exactly am I paying for?) and that's pretty annoying. https://www.metabase.com/docs/latest/installation-and-operat....

But it does let you join tables. Sometimes that's enough to make MB worth dealing with.

Re: Apache Superset

#17
post #3

This looks like grafana, right? Why would I use this instead of grafana?

Much more focused on interactive slicing and dicing of data, rather than mostly following a few pre-defined time-series, as is the focus of Grafana.

As such, closer to an open source replacement for PowerBI.

Re: Apache Superset

#18
post #11

I love Superset. I've been running it in production since 2017, at two jobs, the current one a big corporation. Best general-purpose, database-backed dashboarding system out there. I would never pay for Tableau or PowerBI. Same for Airflow.

Same for Airflow? I’m not sure I understand what you mean.

Re: Apache Superset

#19
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I also found Superset unintuitive to use and setup as well. I settled on standing up Metabase because it was so simple to get started with trying it since it can be launched as a single jar. The business users loved it and so did I and administration with a Postgres backend instead of the internal h2 database was a breeze.

Metabase is great. It truly is a BI tool. Superset is more of a visualization platform, which works great if you have engineers building reports. Less good if you expect more junior analysts to be super productive.

We ran into the same exact issue with Superset not being intuitive, just for a different audience that is more technical. Also went with Metabase which is good, easy to use, lacks some a few chart types but overall the past year has seen quite a few changes and bug fixes consistently happening.

Re: Apache Superset

#20
So it's irritating to me that this is ranking #1 on HN (why is it, btw?) I just pulled the trigger on a large data gathering project using Metabase, and feel a bit hampered by the limitations in terms of charts and plugins... but I considered Superset first, and after a lot of thought I decided that almost everything I've ever worked with that was run by the Apache foundation turned out to be semi-abandoned disasterware over time. In fact I wasn't even sure if Superset was still an active project or if it just looked like one, in the way e.g. no one bothered to pull the OpenOffice website offline.

So now that I picked Metabase, Superset is topping HN for no apparent reason. Why?

Post reply on HN