Metabase vs Looker Pricing and Looker vs Metabase Cost for a 25 Person Team

Metabase vs Looker pricing comes down to a published price list against a sales quote. For a 25 person team, Metabase Cloud costs $2,380 a year on Starter or $8,160 on Pro at list price (read 12 October 2026). Google publishes no price for any Looker edition, and third-party contract data puts Looker Standard at roughly $50,000 to $75,000 a year. Metabase Pro would only reach $50,000 at about 347 users, while Looker Standard is sold for teams under 50. Looker earns the gap only if you need a governed LookML model shared across many teams.

If what your 25 people mostly want is quick answers from Postgres, MySQL, Snowflake or BigQuery rather than a new dashboard platform, a plain-English tool such as AgentSQL covers that for $708 a year. More on that near the end.

Metabase vs Looker pricing side by side

The Looker estimates come from procurement data and pricing guides, not from Google, so use them to sanity-check a quote rather than to budget. Every Metabase figure is from metabase.com/pricing.

How much does Metabase cost for 25 users?

Metabase Cloud costs $2,380 a year for 25 users on Starter and $8,160 on Pro, billed yearly. Starter is $1,080 with five users and $65 for each additional user. Pro is $6,210 with ten users and $130 for each additional user. Enterprise starts at $20,000 a year and is sold through Metabase sales.

The step that matters is Starter to Pro. Starter has no single sign-on and no row or column permissions, so the moment you need sales reps to see only their own accounts, or IT insists on SSO, you are on Pro. At 25 users that step costs $5,780 a year. Our Metabase pricing guide breaks down each tier, and the open-source version is still free to self-host if someone on the team will run the server, upgrades and backups.

How much does Looker cost per year?

Google does not publish a Looker price. Its pricing page describes Looker Standard as built for teams with fewer than 50 users and lists one production instance, 10 Standard Users, 2 Developer Users and up to 1,000 query-based API calls a month. Enterprise keeps the same users and lifts API calls to 100,000. Every edition is an annual commitment priced by Google sales.

For a 25 person team that means a platform fee plus about 13 more seats. Who gets which seat type drives the quote: a Viewer can read and filter dashboards but cannot explore or write SQL, so every new question from a Viewer lands on a Developer or Standard user. Teams then either buy more of the expensive seats or build a request queue. Our Looker pricing page goes through each edition, seat type and the Data Studio products, and Looker vs Domo pricing shows how Looker's meter compares with a credit-based one.

Is Looker Studio the same as Looker?

No, and this is where many Metabase vs Looker comparisons go wrong. Looker Studio, which Google renamed back to Data Studio in April 2026, is a free dashboard tool. Its paid tier, Data Studio Pro, costs $9 per user per project per month, so 25 people on one Google Cloud project pay $2,700 a year, close to Metabase Starter. Looker is the separate enterprise platform with LookML and quote-only pricing. If a page quotes Looker at $9 a user, it is quoting the wrong product.

Looker vs Metabase cost at three team sizes

Metabase Pro grows by $130 a user, so it reaches $50,000 only at about 347 users, far past the 50-user ceiling Google sets for Looker Standard. Inside Looker Standard's range, then, Metabase Pro is cheaper at every size by a factor of five or more. The comparison only gets close at enterprise scale, where Metabase Enterprise and Looker Enterprise are both quoted.

When is Looker worth the price over Metabase?

Looker is worth the money when the semantic model is the product. If finance, sales and a customer-facing embedded dashboard must all compute net revenue the same way, LookML gives you one versioned definition in Git that every query goes through. Companies with that need usually also have developers to maintain it, and they would build the same layer somewhere else anyway.

For most 25 person teams that is not the situation. They want dashboards on a Postgres or Snowflake database, a few people who can answer their own questions, and a bill that does not need a procurement process. That is the Metabase case. The costs to watch there are the ones off the price list: the warehouse queries every dashboard runs, and the stale tables that quietly feed a self-hosted instance. A tool that monitors table freshness and schema changes catches the second before a dashboard reports last week's numbers as today's.

If you are still deciding between these two and the rest of the field, our Metabase alternatives page prices other options on one team, and Metabase vs Tableau runs the same math against Tableau's seat model.

Where AgentSQL fits

We build AgentSQL, so treat this as interested rather than neutral. It is not a Metabase or Looker replacement: it does not build dashboards or a semantic model. It answers the questions that otherwise turn into one more dashboard request. Connect it read-only to PostgreSQL, MySQL, Snowflake or BigQuery, type a question such as which customers downgraded last quarter and what they had in common, and it writes the SQL, runs it, and returns the number, a chart and the exact query so an analyst can check it.

Team is $59 a month billed yearly for up to 10 seats and 1,500 questions a month, $708 a year, and Scale is $179 a month with role-based access and an audit log. A common setup is Metabase for the handful of dashboards everyone opens and a question tool for everything else, which keeps the Metabase user count, and the Pro bill, small. See how it works on text to SQL, or try the console on the home page against your own database.