They're both washboarding apps, and while I'm sure they each have panel types the other doesn't yet support, I don't think that's intrinsic. The differentiation as I see it, is that Superset is designed to craft SQL queries and visualize the results. The query builder is probably where this shows the most.

To make it more concrete -- coworkers tell me Grafana doesn't work so well with Apache Druid, while Superset supports it quite well.

*dashboarding, yikes

I thought this was some jargon I didn't know haha.

I love Grafana but Grafana doesn't really support non-time-series visualization that well.

Why is that, though? I'd think that there'd be some plugins/extensions for Grafana that could do this. Grafana could then become the next PowerBI/Tableau/Superset killer eventually.

Different audience / use case. I've noticed that products often lean towards speaking to app builders (full stack swe's) or data builders (data analysts / scientists / data engineers). They require different mental models I feel.

Grafana I sense is culturally focused on observability visualization (aka needs of full stack devs). Culture is very hard to change!

You can’t trivially plug grafana in front of any SQL database, and grafana is more about graphing/plotting (usually time series).

You can actually plug grafana in front of any SQL database, but I'm not sure it's a good idea.

grafana is built more for operational and timeseries data, but not so optimal for complex analytical queries. Ex: up-to-second data on cpu load on a host.

superset is the flip side of grafana; not good for up-to-second updates, but good for complex queries. Also, non-time series stuff. Ex: Which customer groups bought which products for all time? <— that type of BI stuff.

Much more focused on interactive slicing and dicing of data, rather than mostly following a few pre-defined time-series, as is the focus of Grafana.

As such, closer to an open source replacement for PowerBI.

The fundamental difference is that Grafana isn't great at cross referencing data in different data sources. (I love Grafana and I pay for the Cloud version.)

I found that running TrinoDB in a docker container and adding the trino plugin to grafana was very straightforward. TrinoDB feels magical sometimes, except that the SQL syntax they use seemed awkward IIRC. Also, there are inexplicable performance problems with certain queries that require trying subtlety different SQL queries until it snaps out of it.