Apache Superset

About

Apache Superset

Apache Superset is an open-source data exploration and business intelligence platform that started as an internal Airbnb project by Maxime Beauchemin in 2015 and became a Top-Level Apache Software Foundation project in January 2021. Superset is licensed under the Apache License 2.0 and self-hosted on the operator's infrastructure, with a managed hosting option available through Preset Cloud, the commercial company Beauchemin founded to fund continued development.

Apache Superset was created in 2015 by Maxime Beauchemin while he was a data engineer at Airbnb, as an internal tool for exploring the company's growing data warehouse without the license cost of proprietary BI platforms. Beauchemin, who had previously created Apache Airflow at Airbnb, open-sourced Superset under the Apache 2.0 license in 2016. The project entered the Apache Incubator in 2017 and was promoted to a Top-Level Apache Software Foundation project in January 2021. Beauchemin left Airbnb and co-founded Preset in 2018 to commercialise a managed Superset cloud service while continuing to contribute upstream, and Preset later raised venture funding to support that development effort. Superset is a full BI application that runs on a Python-Flask backend with a React frontend. It connects to more than forty databases through SQLAlchemy dialects, including PostgreSQL, MySQL, Snowflake, BigQuery, Redshift, ClickHouse, Databricks, Trino, and dozens of others. The SQL Lab tool provides an in-browser SQL editor with schema browsing and result exports, and the visualisation library covers more than fifty chart types including time series, distribution histograms, pivot tables, geographic maps, network diagrams, and Sankey flows. Dashboards combine those charts with filters, cross-filter linking, and native templating for parameter-driven views. Superset also supports row-level security, database-level and dashboard-level permissions, alerts and reports delivered by email or Slack, and public sharing where the operator permits it. Apache Superset is distributed free from superset.apache.org as source, Docker images, and a Helm chart for Kubernetes. Preset offers a paid cloud hosting service alongside the free open-source option. Community channels include the Apache Superset Slack workspace, the apache/superset GitHub repository with more than sixty thousand stars, an active mailing list on lists.apache.org, and an annual Superset Meetup conference. The project has become one of the most-used self-hosted BI platforms in engineering-heavy organisations that already run modern data warehouses.