About Evidence
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.
Key features
- Reports written in SQL and Markdown
- Interactive charts and visualizations
- Works with coding agents like Claude Code
- Static site output for self-hosting
- Publishing via Evidence Studio
- Version-controlled analytics code
Good fit for
- →Business reporting as code
- →Self-hosted analytics dashboards
- →Replacing drag-and-drop BI with SQL reports
- Tags
- business-intelligence
- bi-as-code
- sql
- markdown
- data-visualization
- dashboards
- svelte
- duckdb
- dbt
Evidence: questions and answers
- What is Evidence used for?
- Evidence is a code-based business intelligence tool where reports are written in SQL and Markdown, an alternative to drag-and-drop BI that can be self-hosted or published on Evidence Studio. It is a good fit for business reporting as code, self-hosted analytics dashboards and replacing drag-and-drop BI with SQL reports.
- Is Evidence open source?
- Yes. Evidence is open source under the MIT licence. Its source code is on GitHub at evidence-dev/evidence and is written mainly in TypeScript.
- Is Evidence free?
- Yes. Evidence is open source, so the software itself is free to use. A managed cloud version is also available, with paid plans from $2,500 per month.
- Can I self-host Evidence?
- Yes. Evidence can be self-hosted on your own server or infrastructure.
- What is Evidence an alternative to?
- Evidence is an open-source alternative to Tableau, Hex, Power BI and Looker. Other open-source alternatives to Tableau include Superset, Metabase and Lightdash.
- Is Evidence actively maintained?
- Yes. The most recent commit to Evidence was on 1 October 2026. The project has 7k stars on GitHub.
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