
OpenMetadata
OpenMetadata is a unified metadata platform for data discovery, data observability, and data governance powered by a central metadata repository, in-depth column level lineage, and seamless team collaboration.
The Lens
A unified metadata platform that lets you find, understand, and govern your data across every source. Think of it as the search engine for your data infrastructure: tables, dashboards, pipelines, ML models, all cataloged and lineage-tracked in one place. The core is Apache 2.0 and fully self-hostable.
Running it yourself means Docker Compose with a few services (Elasticsearch, MySQL/Postgres, Airflow for ingestion). Not trivial, but not painful either. 84+ connectors out of the box cover Snowflake, BigQuery, Redshift, dbt, Looker, and basically everything else. Data quality tests run no-code, and column-level lineage actually works across joins.
Solo devs won't need this. Small data teams (3-10 people) get massive value: finally knowing what tables exist, who owns them, and whether they're fresh. Enterprise teams get governance, classification, and access policies without buying Collibra or Atlan.
The catch: it's a platform, not a tool. You're adopting an entire metadata layer. If your data infra is two Postgres databases and a dbt project, this is overkill.
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Free vs Self-Hosted vs Paid
fully free## Free Tier Full platform, all features, Apache 2.0. No gated features.
## Self-Hosted Docker Compose or Kubernetes. Needs Elasticsearch + database + Airflow. Medium ops burden for a team that already runs containers.
## Paid Collide (the company behind OpenMetadata) offers managed cloud and enterprise support, but the OSS version is not artificially limited.
Completely free and open source. No paid tier gates features. Enterprise support available if you want it.
License: Apache License 2.0
Use freely. Patent grant included.
Commercial use: ✓ Yes
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