Alto uses Metabase for easy and effective company-wide data analysis.

The Challenge: Before switching to Metabase, Alto’s data analysis tech stack was expensive, slow, and unstable, which made it difficult for teams to access the insights they needed. The company used Tableau, but it required local application development, wasn’t web-friendly, and had low usability, leading to poor team satisfaction. Alto needed an open-source, Docker-compatible, web-based solution that was easy to implement and use.

The Solution: Metabase provided a lightweight, open-source, web-based analytics platform that integrated smoothly with Alto’s existing infrastructure. Metabase allowed teams to create and manage dashboards with minimal technical expertise, reducing the data team’s workload.

The Results: By switching to Metabase, Alto reduced its monthly data platform costs by nearly 90% and significantly improved system performance. The company’s data usage and engagement increased across all teams.

"Metabase helped us achieve a nearly 90% decrease in monthly cost for our data platform while significantly improving our execution speed. Upon launch, we saw a nearly 90% reduction in ad-hoc requests to our team because of how easy and practical Metabase’s UI/UX is from a self-service perspective. "

Jason Turan
Head of Data & Analytics at Alto

Why Metabase?

Before implementing Metabase, Alto’s data analysis tech stack was bloated, expensive, slow, and unstable. Throughout 2023, the team focused on building a new platform that was more compact, cost-effective, faster, and more reliable. They needed a Business Intelligence tool that would be practical, powerful, and web-first in its UI/UX.

Alto had previously used Tableau, but overall satisfaction with the tool was low across the company. After Tableau’s acquisition by Salesforce, some people noticed a shift in focus that affected the platform’s adaptability. For example, the lack of a Dockerized installation made it challenging to deploy within Alto’s Kubernetes environment, requiring alternative solutions to host it on AWS.

Additionally, many employees at Alto found Tableau’s interface less intuitive, which created a learning curve for people. In contrast, Metabase offered a more user-friendly experience, allowing people to start building reports and dashboards quickly.

Alto needed a solution that was:

• Easy to trial
• Preferably from a company offering an open-source version
• Web-first: doesn’t require development in a local/native application
• Docker-compatible
• Enjoyable to use

The data

Alto’s team analyzes application data from their investment platform, including:

• User and investment activity across its entire customer-facing platform (web app, mobile app, APIs used by external partners, etc.)
• Payment data
• CRM data
• API data from their banking and fintech partners

How Alto team uses Metabase

Almost all departments at Alto use Metabase for ad-hoc analysis, reporting, and dashboard creation. The data team initially built a set of dashboards, but now each department manages its own collection, creating and saving dashboards as needed. The platform supports a wide range of skill levels, with power users primarily in Finance, Operations, RevOps, Research, Marketing, and Issuer Relations.

Jason Turan, Alto’s Head of Data and Analytics, finds it fascinating to observe how different teams and employees use Metabase. Some prefer to start with detailed data exploration from the bottom up, while others begin with high-level dashboards and refine their analysis from the top down.

Alto’s team has restricted access to SQL-based queries to the data team only. “Our approach is that if a question can’t be answered using the graphical editor and is needed regularly, we should update our tables or models to enable GUI support,” says Jason. For rare and complex requests, the data team occasionally creates content directly using SQL.

The results

Metabase has proven to be a highly user-friendly and practical tool for Alto, leading to a significant increase in data curiosity across the company. Jason highlights that, unlike many BI tools, Metabase is both approachable and robust, effectively providing the right features at the right time in the user journey. Metabase’s ease of use and thoughtful design have made it a pleasure for Alto’s teams to work with.