Introducing Superset and Preset

The next business intelligence tools we are going to look at are Apache Superset and Apache Preset.

Now these are effectively the same tool, but Apache Superset is the open source version which can be self hosted, whilst Preset is the cloud managed commercial tool.

This is the same situation as Metabase which has the open-source self hosted version.

Preset is always guaranteed to be running the latest version of Superset, so the products stay very much algined from a functionality perspective.

Using Preset

Preset and Superset have a very wide array of visualisations and probably slightly more control over them compared with Metabase which we looked at in the last lesson.

This said, effectively the patterns are the same, we choose metrics and dimensions, we configure our visualisations and then we drop them onto a dashboard.

The connection between Preset and Superset is relatively native, so we connect over the HTTPS API and we choose the Clickhouse Connect API which is a Python based API connector.

Difficulties In Self Hosting

Now one thing I will say about Preset is about Superset is if you are going to run it self-hosted, it's much more complex for Metabase. Metabases ran as a single jar, while Superset is a relatively complex Python application.

What it will do is it will download a number of Docker containers and they have to discover each other.

You tend to get a lot of problems with starting Superset and you need to know a little bit about what is going on to run that.

My preference, I tend to be a cloud person, so my preference anyway is to use Superset when you do have a fully managed experience which we like.

It feels a little bit more complex to use, a little bit more overwhelming in terms of all of the things you can see.