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What does Redash do?

Tool: Redash

The Tech: Data Visualization

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Their Pitch

Redash helps you make sense of your data

Our Take

It's a free dashboard tool that speaks SQL. You connect all your databases, write queries, and turn them into charts that actually refresh automatically instead of living in Excel hell.

Deep Dive & Reality Check

Used For

  • +**Spending 15 hours/week copying data from MySQL, PostgreSQL, and MongoDB into Excel** → Automated dashboards that refresh hourly, zero manual exports
  • +**Your analysts field 30 Slack requests daily for basic metrics** → Self-serve dashboards cut requests to 3 per day
  • +**Custom reporting scripts break every weekend at 3am** → Set up queries once, get reliable alerts when data actually changes
  • +Connects to 50+ data sources in one interface - no more juggling separate database clients
  • +Query results become new data sources - blend databases without building ETL pipelines

Best For

  • >Your team is drowning in manual data exports across 5 different databases
  • >You're comfortable with SQL but tired of building custom reporting scripts that break
  • >Need real dashboards on a startup budget and have someone who can handle Docker

Not For

  • -Teams with zero SQL knowledge — this isn't drag-and-drop, you're writing SELECT statements
  • -Companies processing massive datasets over 1 million rows — queries will crawl at 30-60 seconds
  • -Anyone wanting plug-and-play SaaS — you're self-hosting with Docker, Redis, and PostgreSQL maintenance

Pairs With

  • *PostgreSQL (the main database you're probably querying along with your app data)
  • *dbt (transforms your raw data, then Redash visualizes the clean output)
  • *Airflow (runs your data pipelines, Redash shows you if they're working)
  • *Docker (how you'll actually run this thing since there's no hosted version)
  • *Slack (where your auto-refresh dashboard alerts land when metrics hit thresholds)
  • *GitHub (where you'll grab the source code and probably end up filing bug reports)

The Catch

  • !Self-hosting means 4-8 hours initial setup plus 2-4 hours monthly maintenance for backups and security patches
  • !Crashes with 20+ concurrent users unless you tune Redis and throw more server resources at it
  • !The 'free' part stops being true when you hit $300/month AWS bills that you forgot about

Bottom Line

Free open-source dashboards if you can write basic SQL and don't mind babysitting servers.