Redash is a self-hosted tool for querying data sources and turning the results into shared dashboards. You connect a database once, write SQL in the browser with the schema at hand, and publish what comes back as a chart, a table or a dashboard that colleagues can open without a database account of their own. It supports SQL engines, NoSQL stores, big-data query services and plain HTTP APIs, which is what makes it useful in shops where the data is spread across several systems.

Key capabilities

• Browser SQL editor — schema browser with click-to-insert, reusable query snippets, query parameters, and scheduled execution.
• Visualisations — line, bar, area, pie, scatter, box, heatmap, pivot table, cohort, funnel, sankey, sunburst, word cloud, choropleth and map markers, plus a Plotly code path for custom charts.
• Dashboards — drag and resize widgets, refresh schedules, dashboard-level parameters that flow into every query, public links and an embed mode for intranet pages.
• Alerts — run a query on a schedule and notify a destination when a condition is met.
• Users and permissions — groups, per-data-source access, and a distinction between users who can write queries and users who can only read dashboards.
• API — a REST API covers queries, dashboards, users and data sources, so provisioning can be automated.

Where it fits

Redash was acquired by Databricks in 2020 and continues as an independent open-source project with regular releases — v26.9.0 landed in September 2026. It is BSD-2-Clause licensed, runs from a Docker Compose stack (web, worker, scheduler, Redis, PostgreSQL) and suits teams that are comfortable writing SQL and want a shared read-only view of the results. It deliberately does not try to be a semantic layer or a modelling tool: the query is the unit of work, and everything else is presentation.

Alternatives in the directory

• Apache Superset — heavier BI platform with SQL Lab, datasets and row-level security.
• Metabase — the same query-and-dashboard idea with a point-and-click question builder.