Business Intelligence Services

Metabase is the better choice for most B2B companies that primarily need internal dashboards and self-service analytics for their own team: it is open-source (self-hosted at no licensing cost), has a simple, approachable UI that non-technical business users can use without training, and deploys in hours. Looker is the better choice when: you need to embed BI in your product (Looker's Embedded Analytics SDK and LookML semantic layer are significantly more powerful for product embedding), you have a large team with multiple stakeholders who need governed, consistent metric definitions (LookML enforces the "one source of truth" for each metric), or you are on the Google Cloud Platform (BigQuery integration is native). ClickMasters defaults to Metabase for internal analytics and Looker (or custom chart libraries) for customer-facing embedded analytics.

A semantic layer is a consistent business-logic definition of metrics revenue, churn rate, conversion rate, LTV that sits between the raw data and the dashboards. Without a semantic layer, different dashboard builders write slightly different SQL to calculate the "same" metric one includes free trial users in monthly active users, another doesn't; one calculates MRR per subscription start date, another per calendar month. The result: two dashboards show different revenue numbers for the same period, and stakeholders lose trust in both. The semantic layer defines each metric once, in one place, with the correct business logic and every dashboard that uses that metric gets the same answer. dbt Semantic Layer (with MetricFlow), Looker's LookML, and Cube.js are the leading semantic layer implementations. ClickMasters builds the semantic layer as part of every BI engagement.