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What is Evidence?

Evidence is an open source framework for building data products with SQL - things like reports, decision-support tools, and customer-facing/embedded reporting. It's a code-driven alternative to drag-and-drop BI tools.

Motivation

We think it's still too difficult to build high quality data products. Businesses are stuck with outdated BI software that delivers slow and clunky outputs, and analysts are stuck with manual drag-and-drop workflows.

Our mission is to give you the tools to deliver production-quality data products that look and feel more like the New York Times' data journalism than a drag-and-drop dashboard.

Evidence combines the best of modern web frameworks with the best parts of BI.

Evidence provides:

  • Code-driven workflows: Use your IDE, version control, and CI/CD tools
  • First-class text support: Add context, explanation and insight to your reports
  • Programmatic features: Use loops, conditionals, and templated pages to generate content from data
  • High performance: Evidence projects build into fast and reliable web application
  • Lightweight setup: Install locally and start building reports in just a few minutes

To get started, install Evidence.

How does Evidence work?

Evidence renders a BI website from markdown files:

  1. Data Sources can include data warehouses, flat files and non-SQL data sources
  2. SQL statements inside markdown files run queries against data sources
  3. Charts and components are rendered using these query results
  4. Templated pages generate many pages from a single markdown template
  5. Loops and If / Else statements allow control of what is displayed to users

Pre-requisites

To use Evidence you need to know SQL. A knowledge of basic markdown syntax is also helpful.

Getting help

If you're trying out Evidence, and need some support we'd love to hear from you.

If there's anything you find difficult in the docs, please open an issue or reach out to us on Slack.