I hope you don't mind the self plug: I think Metabase has support for raw SQL, but if you find it hard to translate to Metabase "questions", it sure will be easy to translate into queries in Redash... In Redash you create visualizations from regular SQL queries (although we do support adding parameters and such).
I don't mind the plug at all. I know Metabase supports raw queries, but we're going from normalised schemas to 'flattened' denormalised ones to help the reporting effort.
At the same time, I don't expect the whole organisation to know SQL while I do expect them to make a slight effort to use Metabase's 'Question' interface (if they want data out).
Well done on Redash - It looks and feel very nice. I'll definitely keep an eye on it, but Metabase's 'Questions' and visualisations are a bit more polished for now.
I guess that's the kind of polish VC money buys :-) I went the bootstrap/community route. But I hope that in about two months we will have funds to hire a UI/UX designer to improve the user experience and general look and feel.
> I guess that's the kind of polish VC money buys :-)
quite possibly. I've also read some of their bug threads and they're quite discerning (protective?) of what makes it in from the community. so, money+perfectionism, perhaps.
but honestly - their 'questions' interface is a hell of a lot more fun than sql. thanks to ORMs, my sql knowledge is really quite rusty as well and the simple/constrained "select, filter, aggregate" options on a single table or data source lets me faceroll what I need.
I use both Metabase and Redash in the company that I work for.
Both are really great tools and can replace (at least in part) expensive BI tools.
I'm using both not because they are complementary, but at this moment they have a distinct feature set and no one has all the features that I want/need.
https://redash.io https://github.com/getredash/redash
Disclaimer: I'm the author/founder of Redash.