In the latest RC release notes there's the following note:
LDAP will soon only be available on Pro and Enterprise plans.
Is there any guidance on when this will happen?
I fully appreciate that Metabase needs to make money to sustain itself and pay developers, however it feels a bit wrong to suddenly move existing features behind a $500+/month paywall - especially security features. This practice erodes trust in the product. If we move to Pro, how can we trust that features we become reliant on in Pro won't suddenly be moved to the Enterprise plan with it's nebulous '$15k+ call us' pricing?
We're still sorting out the specifics, and including it in the release notes was a mistake.
There will be a (long) blog post about this once we announce it.
To foreshadow --
Due to a mistake we accidentally put what was supposed to be pro+ only features (group mapping) in the OSS LDAP adaptor.
Including LDAP as a free OSS feature is actually fairly against our rubric for what is OSS vs Paid (supporting proprietary SSO products is pretty much 100% intended to be paid only)
We're intentionally moving very carefully here because it would potentially be the first (and likely only) removal of functionality from the OSS version. Our intent is to rationalize and make it crystal clear what will be in the OSS vs paid versions of the product, and to essentially let you (or any user) predict in advance where any hypothetical future feature would live based on a clear set of heuristics.
Our record here over the last 8 years is pretty clear and we're not going to casually turn Metabase into shareware.
Do you have any information on the number of users who are using LDAP in the free version?
LDAP has always felt like something that should be in the paid for versions, but if it's being used, it seems unfair to remove.
How about just limiting some of the functionality? Groups or limit the number of users supported.
This won't affect any of my customers but moving from free to $6000 per annum is quite a jump.
LDAP is fairly simplistic as an authentication mechanism in 2023. Perhaps restricting SSO/Azure/Google etc would feel like a more reasonable solution. Custom SAML is absolutely a pro feature of course.
In saying this, I am a new user and when I saw the great dashboards I can create as an OSS user, I was extremely impressed so I cant really complain.
well, we use OpenDJ as LDAP server which is also OSS, so it goes completely good together, so the logic that using LDAP only as a Pro+ feature makes not much sense to us.
On the other hand, if using Active Directory or other tools, that would make sense - but not for OSS tools.
well - once the first, then the next we don't know yet about will happen. The 'likely only one' is always the first, most likely more to come - if it happens at all, it will ease more to come....
As a compass, I thought that the OSS version would be meant to firstly connect great to other open source tools. That would make sense since using proprietary tools to connect to would result in more (proprietary) work, which the those pro/enterprise customers would happily pay.
On the other hand, as of today, Metabase also connects to Slack which is not an open source tool - so this would also not totally fit rationally if OSS would be the only compass.
Regarding LDAP, maybe one could make two editions of the connector like 'Basic' (OSS) and 'Advanced' (Pro/Enterprise which would also connect to AD etc...)