lightdash/lightdash

Lightdash is an open-source business intelligence tool, meaning it is software for exploring and visualizing data in a company's database and sharing those insights as charts and dashboards. The project describes itself as an open-source alternative to Looker, a well-known commercial BI product. It is built to work with dbt, a popular tool that data teams use to transform and organize data in warehouses. The central idea is that metrics and dimensions (the definitions of what you are measuring and how you slice the data) live inside your dbt project rather than inside the BI tool. This keeps business logic in one place. When a data analyst updates a metric definition in dbt, Lightdash picks up that change automatically rather than requiring a separate update in the dashboard software. For end users, Lightdash provides a browser-based interface for asking data questions without writing SQL. You pick a model, choose dimensions and metrics from a list, apply filters, and the tool runs the query and renders a chart. You can save charts, combine them into dashboards, schedule email or Slack deliveries, and share results via URL. There is also a drill-down feature for viewing the underlying rows behind a number, and a lineage view that shows how a data model relates to others upstream and downstream. For developers and data engineers, the tool offers preview environments for testing changes before publishing, automated content validation through CI/CD pipelines, and version history with rollback for charts. The project can be run locally with a provided install script, deployed to a cloud hosting service, or self-hosted using Kubernetes and provided Helm charts. A hosted cloud version is also available for teams that do not want to manage their own infrastructure. The full README is longer than what was shown.