These two are less rivals than neighbours, and picking between them usually means one of the two teams asking has the wrong tool in mind.
Metabase is a business-intelligence tool, and at BI it is better than cartapel by a wide margin: self-serve question building for people who do not write SQL, drill-through, scheduled reports, alerts, embedded analytics. cartapel has SQL dashboards — stat tiles, charts, template variables — and does not try to approach that depth.
The same goes for Grafana, which many teams already run for metrics: cartapel sits beside it rather than replacing it, and a Grafana panel can be embedded straight into a cartapel dashboard as an iframe widget, next to the SQL tiles and the tables people edit.
What Metabase is not is an admin panel. It is read-oriented by design: editing a row, running a bulk action, importing a CSV into a production table or granting write access to one column and not another are not jobs it takes on. That is the entire subject of cartapel.
| cartapel | Metabase | |
|---|---|---|
| Primary job | Operations — read and write records safely | Analytics — ask questions of the data |
| Editing data | Inline edit, forms, bulk actions, imports | Read-oriented; limited actions |
| Charts and exploration | SQL tiles and charts you author, plus embedded Grafana panels | Best-in-class self-serve BI |
| Write permissions | Per table, per column, per row, with inheritance | Read permissions; sandboxing is a paid feature |
| Audit of changes | Built in — before/after diff, one-click revert | Not the model — little is written |
| Runtime | One Rust binary | JVM application |
| Configuration | Visual editor or HCL by hand — both produce files in git, reviewed in PRs | GUI; serialization to files is a paid feature |
| License | MIT, free, no seats | AGPL core, paid Pro and Enterprise tiers |
Yellow cells are nuanced — the sections below say why.
iframe widget, so operations and observability live on one screen.Pick Metabase if The job is charts, exploration and reporting — Metabase, and it is not close.
Pick cartapel if The job is a safe, audited panel where people change records — cartapel, beside Metabase rather than instead of it.
No login. Click anything — the demo resets on a schedule.
The admin you already know — but the live schema is the model, and there is no Python app to host it.
The open-source, self-hosted answer when what you actually needed was a database panel, not an app builder.
The closest philosophical neighbour — same introspection bet, a much larger surface, and a different licence.
A spreadsheet over your database, versus a reviewable panel over a schema you did not want touched.
An open-source Airtable that wants to own the data, versus a panel over data that is already owned.
Keep pgAdmin for engineers. cartapel is the one you can safely give to everyone else.
Everything on one page: the full matrix against all seven.