The final part of our tech stack description. This time we discuss the visualization part based on Metabase.

For any analytics platform, the decision on how data gets visualized is a crucial one. It is what users will interact with first and has an important impact on how the quality of a data product is perceived. We discuss the pros and cons of the most popular visualization tools and how they compare to Metabase, which is the tool we settled on for Open Podcast.

Metabase is a popular open source data visualization tool that integrates well with SQL databases. For our hosted variant of Open Podcast, we use Metabase to visualize the data stored on Planetscale.

Before Metabase we used Posthog, which is also great, but doesn't now allow writing custom SQL queries. We also tried Grafana, which is a great tool for time series data, but it also doesn't integrate well with SQL databases and is primarily meant for monitoring solutions.

Other competitors we discuss are Superset, Redash, and Grafana. We also briefly touch on the topic of self-hosted vs. cloud-based solutions.

• How to create dashboards with metabase https://www.metabase.com/docs/latest/dashboards/introduction
• https://superset.apache.org/
• https://posthog.com/
• https://grafana.com/
• https://redash.io/

• Matthias Endler (https://twitter.com/matthiasendler)
• Wolfgang Gassler (https://twitter.com/schafele)

• Email: echo@openpodcast.dev
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/OpenPodcastDev

The theme music is U.S. Army Blues - Kelly’s Number and is licensed under Public Domain Mark 1.0 License.