From Open Source to Enterprise: Why Teams Choose Preset for Apache Superset
Apache Superset™ has become one of the fastest-growing open source analytics projects because it offers a modern, lightweight, and highly extensible way to explore and visualize data. Many organizations adopt Superset because it's easy to try out, integrates well with a wide range of SQL engines, and provides a rich set of visualization options out of the box.
But over time, teams often find themselves asking: What happens when our deployment grows? How do we secure it, scale it, and integrate it into the rest of our enterprise stack? That's where Preset comes in.
Preset took the foundation of Apache Superset — an open source project built for speed and flexibility — and added the critical features enterprises need: managed hosting across major clouds, robust authentication and role-based access, fine-grained security controls, autoscaling infrastructure, and compliance certifications like SOC 2, HIPAA, and PCI. We've invested heavily in performance optimizations, workspace isolation, and governance tooling so that organizations can use Superset not just as a departmental dashboard tool, but as a secure, scalable analytics platform for thousands of users.
Preset has introduced many feature differentiators that make the platform more powerful, user-friendly, and collaborative. Those improvements make Preset awesome for any team, but in this post we're focusing specifically on the features that make Preset enterprise-grade and ready for the most demanding environments.
Why Open-Source Superset Is So Popular
- Fast adoption — teams can self-host quickly and start building dashboards without license negotiations.
- Flexibility — developers can customize visualizations, plugins, and the UI.
- Vibrant community — thousands of contributors improving the project with each release.
This makes Superset a perfect starting point for analytics in startups, research teams, and data-savvy business units.
The Challenges of Scaling Superset Yourself
As usage grows, organizations often hit challenges:
- Authentication & SSO — connecting Superset to Okta, Azure AD, or custom IdPs.
- Fine-grained permissions — role-based access, row-level security, and workspace isolation.
- Operational overhead — running Superset on Kubernetes, patching, upgrades, backups.
- Performance — scaling queries, caching results, and managing concurrency.
- Compliance & security — meeting requirements like SOC 2, FedRAMP, HIPAA, PCI.
Open source Superset can do all of this, but it requires significant engineering investment.
Why Teams Choose Preset
Preset provides a fully managed Superset platform that removes the operational burden while adding enterprise-grade features:
Managed Hosting
- Get bleeding edge features AND the fastest security fixes, ahead of official open-source releases.
- Flexible deployment models tailored to different enterprise needs:
- Preset Cloud — a fully hosted SaaS offering.
- Preset Managed Private Cloud (MPC) — a dedicated, single-tenant environment with enhanced controls and compliance, available on AWS and GCP, with Azure coming soon, and support for private networking options like VPC peering and PrivateLink for secure connectivity to internal data sources.
- Preset Certified Superset (PCS) — a customer-managed deployment option for organizations that want to run Superset in their own infrastructure, with enterprise support and upgrades from Preset.
For teams evaluating different deployment options, this flexibility makes it possible to start in a managed SaaS environment and evolve into a private, single-tenant architecture as requirements grow.
Real-world example: Flywire, a global payments platform, switched to Preset to power embedded dashboards and saw thousands of dollars in annual savings and a significant reduction in engineering maintenance load, enabling faster delivery of analytics to clients and freeing up core engineers for other priorities.
Read the full Flywire Case Study
Scalability
- Workspaces designed for thousands of users, enabling teams to isolate environments for different departments, business units, or customers while still operating on a shared, scalable platform. Learn more: Preset Workspaces and Why You Need Them
Access & Team Management
- Centralized member and role management, with secure defaults and workspace-level controls to support enterprise onboarding, governance, and permissions at scale.
Enterprise Features
- Audit logging.
- Semantic layer integrations.
- Enhanced user and workspace-level API.
- Usage metrics and visibility into adoption, activity, and platform utilization to support governance and operational planning.
Support & Roadmap
- Support and partnership models designed to help teams succeed at scale.
- Early access to Superset innovations and Preset extensions.
Security & Compliance
- SSO/SAML, SCIM user provisioning, and granular role-based access control (RBAC).
- Hardened containers and encryption throughout the platform.
- Compliance support for SOC 2 Type II, HIPAA, PCI, and more.
- Managed reliability and uptime designed for mission-critical enterprise workloads.
For a deeper look at Preset's security posture and compliance commitments, see our Trust & Security documentation.
…and much more. Beyond the enterprise-ready capabilities outlined here, Preset also offers many user-focused enhancements that make working with Superset faster, more intuitive, and more collaborative. To explore those differentiators, check out our post: Turbocharging Apache Superset — The Preset Difference.
The Journey: OSS → Enterprise
Most organizations follow a common path: they start with open source Superset to test analytics use cases and win early adopters, then grow adoption as dashboards spread across teams, business units, and executive stakeholders. Over time, scaling and security needs become more urgent — requirements like SSO, compliance, governance, and supporting thousands of users start to matter just as much as building great dashboards.
That's where Preset comes in. Preset builds on the freedom and flexibility of Superset by adding the scalability, security, and enterprise readiness organizations need as analytics becomes mission-critical.
Whether you need a multi-tenant SaaS cloud or a dedicated single-tenant managed private cloud, Preset provides the right deployment model to help teams move from open source experimentation to an enterprise-grade analytics platform.
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