Evidence
Evidence is an MIT-licensed framework that builds business intelligence from plain files: SQL queries and charts are written inside markdown, and the project compiles to a static website that can be deployed anywhere a static site can.
LicenseOpen source (permissive)· MIT
DeploymentSelf-hostedManaged
PricingFreeSubscription
Operational complexityLow
WorkloadInteractive
LanguageJavaScript, Svelte
Use it when
- Reports should be source code: pages are markdown with SQL in code fences, reviewed in pull requests and diffable when a number changes.
- Zero-ops publishing appeals: the output is a static site, hostable on Netlify, Vercel, Cloudflare Pages, GitHub Pages, or IIS.
- The work is recurring, authored reporting, and templated pages can generate many pages from one file.
- There are no seats to license: MIT-licensed and free to self-host.
Think twice when
- Users need ad-hoc exploration: a static page cannot go beyond what was compiled into it; Metabase serves that end of the capability.
- Freshness matters: data is as current as the last build, and nothing watches or alerts between builds.
- Viewers need access control: the open-source output has no user accounts; SSO belongs to the commercial tier.
How it runs
A build step compiles markdown and SQL into a pre-rendered site, querying BigQuery, Snowflake, Redshift, Databricks, Postgres, DuckDB, and others at build time, so the published site never touches the database. Deploy the output to any static host; Evidence Cloud and the hosted Evidence Studio editor are the commercial layer.
Details
CompareHow Evidence answers the questions Business Intelligence turns on.
Business Intelligence
| How it works | |
| Authoring model | Markdown files with SQL in code fences, written in an editor |
| Semantic layer | No modelling layer: each page's SQL runs against the configured source |
| Query execution | At build time: pages are pre-rendered, so the published site never queries the database; an SPA mode exists for projects too large or too fresh for that |
| Chart library | ECharts underneath a markdown component set (bar, line, area, scatter, sankey, funnel, heatmap and more) with a custom-ECharts escape hatch and whole components written in Svelte |
| Definitions in | Markdown and SQL files in the repository |
| Alerts and delivery | None, and not an oversight, a site built ahead of time has nothing watching the data, so a number reaches you when the next build runs and not before |
| Connections | |
| Connectors | BigQuery, Snowflake, Redshift, Databricks, Postgres, MySQL, SQLite, DuckDB, Trino, plus Google Sheets, CSV and a JavaScript source for anything with an API |
| Embedding | It is a website, so an iframe on any static host; embedded analytics is sold separately as a commercial product rather than configured here |
| Access | |
| Access control | None in the open-source project, the build output is a static site with no users in it, so access control is whatever hosts it; SSO and SCIM are Evidence's commercial tier |
| Cost | |
| Billing unit | Free to self-host on any static host, Netlify, Vercel, Cloudflare Pages, GitHub Pages, even IIS; Evidence Cloud is the paid tier and publishes no price |
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