Evidence
Dashboards as Markdown and SQL, versioned in Git.
94
sovereigntyEvidence 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.
OPEN SOURCEMITSELF-HOSTLOCAL-FIRST
LicenseMIT
PricingFree and open source. Evidence Cloud is an optional paid hosted tier.
Open sourceYes
Self-hostableYes
Local-first dataYes
What it does well
- +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
Where it falls short
- −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
Evidence as an alternative to
Where Evidence shows up in our comparisons, and how it ranked.
Evidence head-to-head
Straight comparisons against the tools people weigh it against.