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Comment by hughess | Hacker News Reader

That's really interesting - airplane.dev looks great.

We've had similar experiences with BI consumers in the past. In our experience, it's really hard to make self-serve work for business users. Initially, we're starting with ways to make it easy for end users to get information out of Evidence (things like CSV download, smooth copy-paste into docs/email/PPT/etc).

Over time we'll be putting more effort into features that will let people explore data from within Evidence (which we call "best of BI" internally). We're thinking very carefully about it so we can hit a few of our key principles: maintainable/version controllable by data team, very fast - no waiting time for users, intuitive for end users - limited if any training required.

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> it's really hard to make self-serve work for business users

Mostly because they cannot be bothered (what else are we paying you devs for?), not because it’s actually hard for them to learn I think.

I think this is right. To say it a different way - lots of business users won't bother looking at BI stuff enough to help you understand what they want, and when they do look, they want something else. Vicious cycle.

Based on what you see about airplane, is there a good feature that evidence has over it? New to both of these tools and am very interested to hear your thoughts.

I haven’t used airplane, but it looks like a more dev oriented retool, which is an awesome idea.

We’re building evidence specifically for producing reporting suites, automated analysis and other data products. As a result, we’re keenly focused on data analysts, not developers per se (although lots of engineers have chosen to use evidence as well).

We offer features focused on that use case and user group. SQL oriented workflow. A large and growing charting library, templates pages, a static build process so your reports are really fast, docs on using it with dbt, those types of things. We have a lot more “best of BI” features to come.

All of that said, I have seen people build really valuable data products with retool, so I am sure you could with airplane as well, but it’s definitely aimed at a much more general developer audience and “internal tool” use case.

Airplane seems to be a more general purpose product for building internal tools, whereas Evidence is really focused on reporting and analysis workflows. At a quick glance, there are 4 things that come to mind for Evidence: 1. Text support, including support for putting values from your data into sentences (narrative-driven reporting) 2. More analytics data sources supported (like DuckDB, SQLite, and CSVs) 3. I would imagine that our charting library has a wider selection, with options for more complex visuals - we spend a lot of time and effort here! 4. Evidence produces a static site, so pages and data are pre-built and users don't need to wait for queries to run when they're using the site

Airplane looks to have some great form-building and interactive app features, so I think it just depends on the problems you're trying to solve

This feels GPT generated, but I guess that is just everything nowadays.

Haha I guess I should avoid using numbered lists

No need. Next time someone asks GPT this question, it's gonna copy paste yours verbatim as part of its smart AI neural net.

Those sounds like nice goals, I'll be watching :)

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