Chartbrew

What is Chartbrew?

Chartbrew is an open source reporting platform that connects directly to your databases and APIs and turns the data into live charts and shareable dashboards. You build reusable datasets, drop them into charts, and publish dashboards that refresh on a schedule — no separate data warehouse or heavy BI stack required.

What is Chartbrew best for?

Small-to-medium product, SaaS, and agency teams that need live KPI dashboards — revenue, signups, usage, activation — pulled from the tools they already run. It shines when you want to sit Stripe revenue next to Google Analytics traffic next to your app’s own Postgres metrics on one client-ready or embeddable dashboard.

What can Chartbrew do?

• Connect 15+ data sources: PostgreSQL, MySQL, MongoDB, Firestore, Firebase, plus SaaS APIs like Stripe, Google Analytics GA4, Customer.io, and any custom REST API
• Build reusable datasets once and reuse them across multiple charts and dashboards
• Write queries faster with a built-in AI SQL assistant
• Refresh data on a schedule and push alerts to Slack or email
• Embed charts and dashboards in your own product, or share them with clients via public links
• Automate reporting through a REST API for programmatic dashboard creation

Where does Chartbrew fall short?

The query builder is deliberately light. If you need joins across many tables, calculated fields, or statistical and cohort analysis, you’ll hit its limits fast — it’s built for KPI tracking, not exploratory data work, so tools like Metabase or Apache Superset go deeper there.

The chart library is solid but narrower than Tableau, Power BI, or Superset — fewer visualization types and less fine-grained styling. Performance can also lag on very large datasets or heavily nested joins, so it fits moderate data volumes and simpler schemas best.

Is Chartbrew free?

Yes — self-hosting is 100% free with no limits under the open source license. The managed Chartbrew Cloud is the paid option: plans run from $24/month (Starter) to $66/month (Growth) and $249/month (Professional), each with a 14-day free trial, plus a custom Enterprise tier. Paid tiers add higher dashboard/chart limits, more team seats, faster refresh intervals, and more AI credits.

What does Chartbrew replace?

Chartbrew stands in for hosted BI suites for teams that mainly need dashboards and KPI reporting. It’s a practical Tableau alternative, Power BI alternative, and Looker alternative — cheaper and self-hostable — though it trades away the deep modeling and analytics those enterprise platforms offer.

FAQ

Is Chartbrew open source? Yes, but under the Functional Source License (FSL-1.1-MIT), not a classic permissive license. You can self-host, modify, and use it freely; you can’t offer it as a competing hosted service. Each release automatically converts to the MIT License two years after it ships.

Can I self-host Chartbrew for free? Yes. Deploy it on your own servers with the official Docker image and Docker Compose files at no cost, with no dashboard or user limits.

What do I need to run Chartbrew? Node.js v22+, a MySQL (5+) or PostgreSQL (12.5+) database, and a Redis instance (v6+). An official Docker image (razvanilin/chartbrew) bundles the React frontend and Node.js backend.

Is Chartbrew a good Tableau or Power BI alternative? For live KPI dashboards on small-to-medium teams, yes — it’s far cheaper and self-hostable. For heavy data modeling, advanced analytics, or large-scale exploration, the enterprise tools still win.