As of 1 Nov 2026, the panel rates Cluvio 3/5 and Metabase 3.5/5 in Business Intelligence & Dashboards. Weighted by what each judge cares about, 0 of the 6 judges pick Cluvio and 6 pick Metabase. Cluvio scores higher on 1 of 7 criteria (European sovereignty). Metabase scores higher on 6 of 7 criteria (Self-service analysis & shared metrics, Dashboards, charts & interactivity, Access control, administration & portability, plus 3 more). Provenance — Cluvio: EU-Made; Metabase: Rest of world. Ratings are the AI panel’s opinion, formed from public evidence: how scores are made.
Six judges lean Metabase on dashboards and visualization (6.5 vs 4.2), self-service and modelling (7.0 vs 4.0) and governance and portability (7.8 vs 5.8); four lean Metabase, two tie, on sharing and embedding (7.8 vs 7.0); two lean Metabase, four tie, on data connectivity (6.2 vs 5.7); pricing transparency: 7.5 vs 7.0, three lean Metabase, one Cluvio, two tie. Cluvio leads sovereignty, 6.8 to 6.5 — two lean Cluvio, one Metabase, three tie. Connectivity split: Metabase documents 18 database and warehouse connectors but only tool-by-tool guides for Stripe, HubSpot and Shopify; Cluvio's documented connectors stop at databases and files. Sovereignty split: Cluvio's pages state both that European data stays in Europe and that processing occurs outside the EEA including the US; Metabase's verdict weighs air-gapped self-hosting and a Frankfurt region against a California-law contracting entity with no public information on subprocessors or a data processing agreement. The splits are the answer.
Choose Cluvio if
You need queries to run directly on your own databases, hosted on AWS with the account region chosen at signup; sovereignty is the criterion where the bench leans Cluvio's way (two lean Cluvio, one Metabase, three tie; means 6.8 to 6.5).
Your procurement specifies a European vendor: Cluvio comes from Cluvio GmbH of Berlin and is recorded as an EU-made product.
Your data lives in SQL warehouses and your analysts work in SQL and R: the judges working from a SQL warehouse scored Cluvio 6 to 7 on data connectivity.
Choose Metabase if
Your non-SQL business users need a no-SQL query builder and a semantic layer whose metric edits propagate to every question: self-service and modelling went 7.0 to 4.0, six judges leaning Metabase.
You need pivot tables, drill-down or a visual query builder: we found no public information on these for Cluvio, and six judges leaned Metabase on dashboards and visualization (6.5 vs 4.2).
Your permissions must reach row and column level, with an audit log, a REST API and an AGPL self-hosted edition: governance and portability went 7.8 to 5.8, six judges leaning Metabase.
You will embed analytics in your own product and need server-signed embeds, locked parameters for per-viewer data isolation and a React SDK: sharing and embedding went 7.8 to 7.0, four judges leaning Metabase and two tying.
Your stack is databases and warehouses: Metabase queries 18 official connectors live, and data connectivity went 6.2 to 5.7 with two judges leaning Metabase and four tying.
Read this comparison as one judge. Each weighs the same scores by what they care about.
The Skeptic
Has seen "connect any data source" on a tool with eight connectors and a CSV upload, "self-service" that ends with every department defining revenue its own way, "free viewers" that need a paid licence to open a shared link, and "AI insights" that never show the query. Asks where the extracts are stored, whether dashboards and definitions can be exported in a format another tool reads — and what leaving would cost.
Cluvio
Metabase
This judge's pick
Criterion by criterion
Data sources, connectors & refresh
Cluvio
Sixteen named SQL databases and warehouses, each with its own connection page naming the settings and connection modes, live queries against the customer's own databases, and firewall access via SSH tunnels, IP allow-listing or an open-source agent. But the only file support is CSV and Excel upload (Google Sheets is stated as planned), we found no public information on business-application connectors or a generic REST connector, and the vendor itself states it is not possible to use data from different datasources in a single report, offering ETL or federated queries as the way around it.
Metabase
Eighteen named official database and warehouse connectors plus eleven community ones (self-hosting only, unsupported) are published, queries run live against the source — "Metabase doesn't ingest it, store it, or do refreshes" — and SSH tunnels, five SSL modes and a transforms-based modelling step are documented. But I found no connector to any business application, only an integrations catalog of "tool-by-tool guides" for Stripe, HubSpot and Shopify which are guides, not connectors; Google Sheets syncs only on Cloud plans with storage; and we found no public information on a generic REST or custom connector SDK, or on per-plan connector limits.
Dashboards, charts & interactivity
Cluvio
Dashboards are grids of SQL-driven reports shown as chart, table or number, with WebGL maps, built-in time-range, aggregation and time-zone controls, dependent dropdown filters with saved defaults, and auto-refresh on wall-mounted screens — filters are documented in real depth. The chart library itself is only asserted as professional charts and graphs, and we found no public information on pivot tables, drill-down, KPI tiles with target comparison, templates, localised number and date formats, or accessibility of the result.
Metabase
Dashboard-wide filters with six widget types, required and default values, cross-filtering and an unusually detailed drill-through menu are documented, along with maps, histograms, goal lines, progress bars, drag-to-filter ranges and light/dark theming with colour and font customisation on Pro and Enterprise. But we found no public information on pivot tables, KPI tiles with period comparison, mobile or TV display, conditional formatting, chart annotations or accessibility, and localisation appears only as an embed locale setting.
Self-service analysis & shared metrics
Cluvio
Everything runs through SQL: an editor with autocompletion and syntax highlighting, centrally maintained SQL snippets whose changes propagate automatically to every referencing report, filter and alert, R post-processing, and per-user context variables usable inside queries — a genuine defined-once layer, if only at the SQL level. Viewers are documented as able to view published dashboards and use filters and nothing more, and we found no public information on a visual query builder for non-SQL users, natural-language questions showing their query, forecasting with a stated method, or version control of definitions.
Metabase
A no-SQL query builder, a SQL editor, spreadsheet-like custom expressions and metrics whose edits propagate immediately to every question using them are documented, with measures synced to Git and metrics markable as verified on Pro and Enterprise. The fine print is what a buyer needs: metrics are query-builder only, unavailable in joins or nested questions, and we found no public information on forecasting, anomaly detection, notebooks, or whether the plain-English AI assistant shows the query it ran.
Sharing, scheduled reports & embedding
Cluvio
Sharing links that can be password-protected, IP-restricted and set to expire; scheduled email delivery as image, PDF, Excel or CSV; SQL alerts by email; and iframe embedding built on JWT sharing secrets with per-user WHERE-clause context restriction, white-label colour schemes, postMessage control, and sample code in seven languages. Viewers are stated as unlimited and free on the paid plans, and interactive embedding is gated to named plans rather than a separate metered fee — though we found no public information on delivery to Slack or Teams, comments or annotations, or custom domains.
Metabase
Alerts deliver via email, Slack or webhook on schedules from by-the-minute to custom Quartz cron, dashboard subscriptions exist, and embedding is documented three ways — view-only, interactive SSO with per-viewer data isolation via server-set locked parameters, and a React SDK with white-label styling — priced "From $575 / month". But guest embeds are always view-only and carry a "Powered by Metabase" banner on OSS and Starter, row and column security does not apply to public links, and we found no public information on export to PDF or PowerPoint or on comments and annotations.
Access control, administration & portability
Cluvio
Admin, analyst and viewer roles with user groups and a draft-to-published workflow, SAML 2.0 single sign-on on paid plans with documented setup for Google, Microsoft and Okta, an audit trail of logins, queries and object changes available to admins on request, a public API with a published OpenAPI 3.1 document plus a command-line tool, and dashboards exportable as JSON from which a dashboard can be recreated. Row-level restriction exists only as do-it-yourself SQL context or embedding parameters rather than a documented security feature, and we found no public information on SCIM provisioning, column-level security, development and production environments, or a self-hosted edition; helpfully, analytical data stays in the customer's own databases by architecture.
Metabase
Permissions are documented down to database, table, schema, row and column, impersonation hands row-level control to database-defined roles, there is an audit log, usage analytics, content serialisation with stable entity IDs for staging-to-production moves, a documented REST API with a downloadable OpenAPI 3.1.0 specification, and an AGPL-licensed self-hosted edition with its own documentation. The pages also state the limits plainly, which I respect: native SQL access bypasses row and column security, the API is explicitly not versioned, and account termination "may result in destruction of any Content" — the exit is the self-hosted edition and serialisation, not the cloud contract.
European sovereignty
Cluvio
A German contracting entity with a commercial register entry and VAT number, an account region chosen at signup with a stated guarantee that data processed on the account stays within it, analytical queries executed on the customer's own databases with only a transient 24-hour cache inside the vendor's private network, an Article 28 data processing agreement signable in the account settings, standard contractual clauses for transfers outside the EEA, and named subprocessors including Recurly in the USA and Braintree in Luxembourg. The security page lists several further US services without per-item locations, the certifications shown are AWS's own compliance rather than the vendor's, and the captured pages give different pictures: the features page states European data stays in Europe while the privacy policy confirms processing outside the EEA including the US.
Metabase
The contracting entity is Metabase, Inc. under California law, cloud hosting offers a Europe (Frankfurt) region, and the security page states query results are not stored "on our end" unless caching is enabled, while self-hosting keeps data on the customer's own servers and open-source instances "never need to call into us at all". Still, I found no public information naming the subprocessors or on a data processing agreement, and the AI service priced at $3.75 per 1m tokens sends its prompts somewhere the captured pages never name.
Pricing transparency
Cluvio
A forever-free single-user plan with concrete limits — 1 datasource, 3 dashboards, 1000 query executions per month, 24-hour refresh — additional analysts priced at € 99 / $ 109 per month on Pro and € 199 / $ 219 per month on Business with unlimited included viewers, and per-tier caps published for dashboards, schedules, refresh rate, query duration, result rows and CSV export size, alongside a 14-day business trial without credit card, a one-month default term and VAT treatment with EU reverse charge. Only the Enterprise tier at Custom, an optional HIPAA add-on, and bespoke limit changes arranged through support sit outside the public numbers.
Metabase
Starter at $100 / month with five users then $6 per user / month, Pro at $575 / month with ten users then $12 per user / month, storage at $2 for 1M rows after the first million free, transforms at $0.01 and advanced transforms at $0.02 per run, and AI at $3.75 per 1m tokens give a buyer most of the arithmetic — and the definition "Everyone who signs into your Metabase... is a user for purposes of billing" at least tells you plainly that viewers are never free. But Enterprise is only a "$20,000 / year" floor, the air-gapped edition carries an unspecified "additional fee", feature gates like row and column security and the embedding SDK sit on Pro and Enterprise, and we found no public information on minimum term or setup costs.
Sovereignty, side by side
Dimension
Cluvio
Metabase
Legal entity
Not determined
Not determined
Hosting location
Not determined
Not determined
Hosting options
Not determined
Not determined
Open source
Not determined
Not determined
Data processing agreement
Not determined
Not determined
Transfer impact assessment
Not determined
Not determined
Facts, side by side
Only facts both products carry under the same definition — anything else would not be a fair row.
As of 1 Nov 2026, the panel rates Metabase higher: 3.5/5 against 3/5. Weighted by what each judge cares about, 0 of the 6 judges pick Cluvio and 6 pick Metabase. Which one fits depends on the criteria that matter to you; the table on this page shows both side by side, and each judge’s reading has its own page. Both were scored by the same AI bench under the same rubric, from public evidence only, as the methodology describes.
Is Cluvio or Metabase European?
Cluvio is European (EU-Made). Metabase is not European by provenance (Rest of world). Provenance is read from each company’s own legal pages: who builds it and who owns it.
Where do Cluvio and Metabase store customer data?
Per the vendors’ own pages as captured — Cluvio: Default not stated; pages mention the EU and the US. Metabase: its pages as captured do not say.
Do Cluvio and Metabase have a free plan?
As of 1 Nov 2026, Cluvio’s own pages state a free plan; Metabase’s pages as captured do not. Each product page links the pricing page it was read from.