Evidence vs Microsoft Power BI
Both are alternatives to Tableau. Here's how they stack up — verified facts, no spin.
Also searched as Microsoft Power BI vs Evidence — same comparison, one verdict.
Evidence
Dashboards as Markdown and SQL, versioned in Git.
Evidence takes a genuinely different position: a report is a Markdown file with SQL in it, built into a static site. That means dashboards live in your repository, get reviewed in pull requests, deploy through CI and cannot be silently edited by someone in a UI. MIT licensed. It is the wrong tool for exploratory analysis and the right one for recurring, trusted reporting that has to be identical every month. Included because the BI category assumes a GUI is a requirement and for a good number of engineering teams it is the opposite.
Microsoft Power BI
A fifth of Tableau's per-seat price, if you are already on Microsoft.
Power BI Pro is about $14 per user per month against Tableau Creator's $75, and for organisations already inside Microsoft 365 the integration with Excel, Teams and Azure is genuinely deep. Listed here because refusing to name the obvious commercial alternative would be dishonest: for a Microsoft-shop finance department, Power BI is very often the right answer and no open tool changes that. The costs are the usual ones — proprietary, Windows-centric for authoring, and Fabric capacity pricing escalates sharply once you outgrow Pro.
Side by side
| Evidence | Microsoft Power BI | |
|---|---|---|
| Sovereignty Score | 94 | 28 |
| Open source | Yes | No |
| Self-hostable | Yes | No |
| Local-first | Yes | No |
| License | MIT | Proprietary (hosted service) |
| Pricing | Free and open source. Evidence Cloud is an optional paid hosted tier. | Power BI Pro about $14/user/month; Premium and Fabric capacity considerably more. Checked 2026-08-04. |
Evidence edges it on the Sovereignty Score, but the right pick depends on the trade-offs below.
Evidence
Strengths
- +Reports live in Git — reviewed, versioned, deployable through CI
- +MIT with no enterprise carve-out
- +Output is a static site: fast, cheap, nothing to keep running
- +Impossible to quietly alter a number without a commit
Trade-offs
- −No point-and-click building — you write SQL and Markdown
- −Not an exploration tool; it produces fixed reports
- −Non-technical staff cannot author
- −Small community
Microsoft Power BI
Strengths
- +Roughly a fifth of Tableau's per-seat cost
- +Deep integration with Excel, Teams and the Microsoft estate
- +Strong data modelling with DAX
- +Familiar to anyone who has used Excel seriously
Trade-offs
- −Proprietary and hosted; deepens Microsoft lock-in
- −Authoring is effectively Windows-only
- −Fabric capacity pricing escalates steeply at scale
- −Practically requires a Microsoft-centric organisation
Related alternative guides
Facts verified 2026-08-04. Licenses and pricing change — spotted something out of date? That's a correction we want.