Metabase vs Power BI Pricing and Which One to Buy at 10, 50 and 200 Users
Metabase Cloud Starter beats Power BI Pro on price from the eighth user, and the gap is $4,395 a year at 50 people. Here is the full bill for both at 10, 50 and 200 users, what each charges for AI questions, and the cases where Power BI is still the right purchase.
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Metabase vs Power BI comes down to headcount and where your data lives. On hosted list prices, Metabase Cloud Starter is cheaper than Power BI Pro from the eighth user on: at 50 users it is $4,005 a year against $8,400, and at 200 users $13,755 against $33,600. Power BI wins on price for teams of 7 or fewer, and it costs nothing extra if your company already has Microsoft 365 E5. Self-hosted Metabase has no license fee at all.
Prices below were read on 7 October 2026 from metabase.com/pricing and from Microsoft's Power BI pricing page. Both vendors bill annually at these rates.
Metabase vs Power BI pricing at a glance
| Plan | List price | What the price covers |
|---|---|---|
| Metabase open source | $0 | Self-hosted, unlimited users, you run the server |
| Metabase Cloud Starter | $100 a month, or $1,080 a year | 5 users included, then $6 a month or $65 a year each |
| Metabase Pro | $575 a month, or $6,210 a year | 10 users included, then $12 a month or $130 a year each |
| Metabase Enterprise | From $20,000 a year | Quote from sales |
| Power BI free account | $0 | One person, no sharing |
| Power BI Pro | $14 a user a month | Publish and view shared reports |
| Power BI Premium Per User | $24 a user a month | Pro plus larger models and premium features |
| Microsoft Fabric capacity | F2 from about $156 a month reserved | Needed for Copilot, billed on top of user licenses |
The two tools charge on different shapes. Metabase sells a base fee with a bundle of users and a small price for each one after. Power BI sells seats with no base fee. That is why Power BI is cheaper for a handful of people and Metabase pulls ahead as the team grows.
What 10, 50 and 200 users cost for a year
| Team | Metabase Cloud Starter | Metabase Pro | Power BI Pro | Power BI Premium Per User |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 10 users | $1,405 | $6,210 | $1,680 | $2,880 |
| 50 users | $4,005 | $11,410 | $8,400 | $14,400 |
| 200 users | $13,755 | $30,910 | $33,600 | $57,600 |
Three break-even points fall out of that table, and they are worth writing on the quote.
- 8 users. Below this, Power BI Pro costs less than Metabase Cloud Starter. At 7 users it is $1,176 against $1,210. At 8 it flips to $1,344 against $1,275.
- 32 users. From here Metabase Pro costs less than Power BI Premium Per User, the closer match on features.
- 130 users. From here even Metabase Pro, the tier with embedding and row-level permissions, costs less than plain Power BI Pro.
One caution on the Metabase side. Metabase counts the people who see charts embedded in your own product as users, at the same $65 or $130 a year. If you plan to put dashboards in front of customers, count those viewers in the headcount before you compare. The tiers are covered line by line on our Metabase pricing page, and Microsoft's on Power BI pricing. If you are stuck between the two Microsoft seats, Power BI Pro vs Premium Per User has the limits that force the upgrade.
Where Power BI is the better purchase
Your company already pays for Microsoft 365 E5. E5 includes Power BI Pro for every user, so the license comparison above does not apply. Metabase would be a new line on the budget and Power BI would not.
You need a real modeling layer. Power Query and DAX let an analyst combine spreadsheets, SaaS exports and databases into one model with calculated measures. Metabase expects clean tables in a SQL database and leaves heavy transformation to SQL or dbt upstream.
Finance wants formatted, printable reports. Paginated reports, Excel integration and Teams embedding are mature in Power BI. Metabase has dashboards and email subscriptions, which cover most operational reporting but not a pixel-exact board pack.
The team is seven people or fewer. At that size the seat price wins. Five analysts on Power BI Pro pay $840 a year.
Where Metabase is the better purchase
Your data is in Postgres, MySQL, Snowflake or BigQuery and you want it live. Metabase connects, reads the schema and lets people click through tables the same day. There is no desktop client to install and no dataset to publish.
Part of the team is on Macs. Power BI Desktop is Windows only. Metabase authors and viewers both work in the browser. If that is your main reason for looking, our guide to a Power BI alternative for Mac compares the browser-based options.
You have many readers and few builders. Power BI charges every reader $14 a month. Metabase charges $65 a year for each user past the bundle, about 39 percent of the Power BI rate, which is the whole reason the 200-user row is $13,755 against $33,600.
You would rather self-host. The open source edition is free for any number of users under the AGPL license. You pay for a server and for someone to upgrade it, and if you go that way put uptime checks on the instance, because a dashboard tool that is down on Monday morning gets blamed on the data team. Power BI Report Server, Microsoft's on-premises option, is a different product with its own licensing.
What each one charges when people ask questions in plain English
This is the line that changed most in the last year, and most comparisons skip it.
| Metabase | Power BI | |
|---|---|---|
| Where AI questions are included | Starter and above | Copilot, on Fabric capacity only |
| Extra cost | Your own AI provider key, or $3.75 per million tokens with 1 million included | F2 capacity from about $156 a month reserved, $262.80 pay-as-you-go, plus Pro seats |
| Older free feature | None retired | Q&A retires in February 2027 |
Power BI's free natural-language box, Q&A, is on its way out, and its replacement sits behind capacity that a 10-person team would not otherwise buy. We priced that change in detail in Power BI Q&A replacement, and the license rules are on the Power BI Copilot license page. For a 10-user team, Power BI Pro plus a reserved F2 comes to about $3,556 a year, more than double the Pro seats alone.
If the real need is answers, price a third option
Both products are dashboard tools first. Someone still has to build the chart before a manager can read it, and in most companies that someone is one or two analysts with a queue. If the reason you are comparing Metabase and Power BI is that sales, ops and finance keep waiting for numbers, a dashboard license for each of them does not shorten the queue.
AgentSQL is built for that case. It connects read-only to Postgres, MySQL, Snowflake or BigQuery, takes a question typed in plain English, writes the SQL, runs it and returns a chart, a table, a one-line answer and the query itself so an analyst can check it. The Team plan is $59 a month billed yearly, $708 a year, for up to 10 seats and 1,500 questions a month with the model included.
| 10 people who need answers | Cost for a year | AI questions |
|---|---|---|
| AgentSQL Team | $708 | Included, 1,500 a month |
| Metabase Cloud Starter | $1,405 | Included, model usage billed separately |
| Power BI Pro | $1,680 | Not included |
| Power BI Pro plus F2 reserved | About $3,556 | Copilot |
We are not a replacement for a 60-page Power BI model or a wall of Metabase dashboards, and we connect to four engines where they connect to dozens. Plenty of teams keep one BI tool for the fixed reports and add AgentSQL for everything nobody built a chart for. You can try a question in the console at the top of this page before paying anything, and see how it handles your own schema on the text to SQL page.
How to choose in four questions
- Is your company on Microsoft 365 E5? If yes, Power BI Pro is already paid for. Start there.
- How many people will log in a year from now? Under 8, Power BI Pro is cheaper. From 8 up, Metabase Cloud Starter is.
- Do you need DAX models, paginated reports or Excel integration? If yes, Power BI. If your data already sits in clean SQL tables, Metabase gets you there with less setup.
- Who is actually waiting? If it is non-technical people with one-off questions, test an AI data analyst on the same database before you buy seats for all of them.
If Metabase is the direction but you have not settled on it, Metabase alternatives prices nine other options from each vendor's page, and Superset pricing covers the other open source route.
›_ frequently asked
Common questions
- Is Metabase cheaper than Power BI?
- For 8 or more users on the hosted plans, yes. Metabase Cloud Starter is $1,080 a year with 5 users included and $65 for each extra user, while Power BI Pro is $168 per user a year. At 50 users that is $4,005 against $8,400. For 7 users or fewer, Power BI Pro costs less, and self-hosted open source Metabase has no license fee at any size.
- Is Metabase better than Power BI?
- It is better for a team that wants a browser-based tool running in an afternoon on Postgres, MySQL, Snowflake or BigQuery, with no desktop client. Power BI is better for heavy data modeling, DAX measures, paginated reports and anything inside Microsoft 365. Most teams choose on where their data and their logins already live.
- Can Metabase replace Power BI?
- For dashboards, scheduled reports and self-serve questions on a SQL database, yes. It does not replace Power Query transformations, complex DAX models or Excel-style paginated reports, so those need rebuilding in SQL or dbt first. Teams with a few dozen reports on one database usually move in weeks. A large semantic model takes far longer.
- Does Metabase work on a Mac?
- Yes. Metabase runs entirely in the browser for both authors and viewers, so it works the same on Mac, Windows and Linux. Power BI Desktop, where reports are authored, is Windows only. Mac users can view and lightly edit in the Power BI web service but need a Windows machine or VM to build models.
- Is Power BI included in Microsoft 365?
- Only in the top tier. Microsoft 365 E5 includes Power BI Pro for every user. Other Microsoft 365 plans do not, so each person who publishes or views shared reports needs a $14 a month Pro license. If your company is already on E5, Power BI costs nothing extra and Metabase would be an added line.
- What does AI cost in Metabase and Power BI?
- Metabase includes AI questions and SQL generation from the Starter plan. You bring your own AI provider key, or use Metabase's service at $3.75 per million tokens with 1 million included. Power BI Copilot needs paid Fabric capacity on top of user licenses, and the smallest, F2, is about $156 a month reserved or $262.80 pay-as-you-go.
See AgentSQL write and run the SQL live.
Ask a question in plain English, watch the query appear, and get a chart and an answer with the SQL shown. Then point AgentSQL at your own database.
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