Open-source Observable alternatives

Evidence is a code-first business intelligence tool, released as open source, offered in place of drag-and-drop BI products. Reports and dashboards are written as Markdown with SQL queries, which keeps them in version control and lets analysts build interactive data visualizations without a point-and-click builder.

The README calls it agent-ready: you can develop with Evidence's own agent, or locally with coding assistants such as Claude Code or Cursor. Topics mention dbt, DuckDB, Svelte, Tailwind CSS, WebAssembly and self-hosting. A project is created from an installer for macOS, Linux or Windows, and the result can be published on Evidence Studio for hosted reports, or built as a static site and self-hosted on your own infrastructure.

Evidence is written in TypeScript with Svelte and licensed under MIT, and has a Slack community for help. It suits data teams and analysts who are comfortable with SQL and want reports reviewed and deployed like software, rather than assembling dashboards in a GUI.

Apache Zeppelin is a web-based notebook for interactive data analytics. You build data-driven, collaborative documents using SQL, Scala and other languages, and the notebook-style editor supports real-time collaboration between users.

Core features include support for many languages through a pluggable interpreter architecture with process isolation, including Spark, Flink, Python, SQL and Shell and more than 20 interpreters, built-in visualization and dynamic forms, and notebook scheduling with cron. Flexible deployment options are local, Docker, Kubernetes and YARN. Topics place it in the big data ecosystem alongside Spark, Flink, NoSQL and databases.

Zeppelin is an Apache Software Foundation project written in Java and JavaScript and licensed under Apache-2.0. You install it from a binary package or build from source, with user guides, mailing lists and a Jira issue tracker. It suits data engineers and analysts who work on cluster-based data platforms and want shareable, scheduled notebooks.

Briefer combines notebooks and dashboards in a single product, aimed at technical users who need the flexibility of code for analysis while making results easy for non-technical colleagues to view and interact with. It is described by its creators as similar to Notion, but built for code notebooks and dashboards rather than general documents.

Users can create notebooks and dashboards combining Markdown, Python, SQL and native visualizations, build interactive data apps with inputs, dropdowns and date pickers, generate code and queries with an AI that understands the connected database schema, schedule notebooks and dashboards to refresh periodically, and create write-back pipelines for testing changes against data. It also supports real-time multiplayer editing so multiple people can work on the same notebook or dashboard together.

The README states that Briefer has been acquired by Resend, with further updates referenced in the project's blog. It can be run locally by installing it with pip, which requires Docker, or used through a hosted cloud version; it is released under the AGPL-3.0 license and lists PostgreSQL among its supported data sources.