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Hi, I'm one of the founders of Evidence. We're in the process of overhauling our docs and I'd love to hear any issues you ran into so we can make them better. Any feedback appreciated!

Did you end up finding the map examples?

Thank you - I can’t seem to change it now, but good to know for next time. Appreciate the feedback!

Fair point - was just listing out the tools used in this viz library! The leaflet examples are at the bottom of that page.

What would you suggest as a better title?

This is great - I used to use R all the time when I worked in finance and wish I had this resource back then!

R and RMarkdown were big inspirations for what we're building at evidence.dev now, so very grateful to everyone involved in the R community

Examples from this fairly custom implementation: https://docs.evidence.dev/components/all-components/

We use echarts at https://evidence.dev and have been quite happy with it. We do a lot of embedded analytics and it's worked well for us.

Great article and big fan of this approach.

I'm one of the maintainers of Evidence (open source tool based on markdown + SQL) and working on a similar approach to creating presentation tables configurable in code.

Some examples here for any SQL + table enthusiasts: https://docs.evidence.dev/components/data-table

We recently changed our architecture to include interactivity without having to pre-render all combinations. Pages are still pre-rendered with their initial content, but each Evidence app now ships with filter components and an in-browser DuckDB instance so you can build interactive apps. We call this Universal SQL - if you're interested, we wrote up our rationale for doing this here: https://evidence.dev/blog/why-we-built-usql/

Here's an example project with some filter components and custom styling: https://ecommerce.evidence.app/

This is still a static app - the data warehouse was only hit during the app's build process

I'm one of the founders of Evidence (https://evidence.dev) - would be great to hear about your experience. Reaching out now!

You might be interested in Evidence, a SQL-based open source BI tool where all content is version-controllable. Disclaimer: I’m one of the maintainers. A lot of companies use Evidence for customer facing and embedded reporting.

https://github.com/evidence-dev/evidence

Previous HN discussions:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35645464 (97 comments)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28304781 (91 comments)

We're fans of Obsidian! DataView looks cool - love the ability to define the tables in code inline in the markdown. That's similar to how we inline DuckDB WASM SQL queries in markdown: https://docs.evidence.dev/core-concepts/queries/

We use ECharts in our open source BI tool (Evidence) and it's a great library. Has helped us build a declarative syntax for viz which can be version controlled (https://evidence.dev)

Previous HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35645464 (97 comments)

I found this difficult as well, so I ended up making this Google sheet to compare: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1belBpTKOPGaCC230l0ns...

We used ECharts to build our charting library at Evidence and it’s been a great experience overall (https://evidence.dev).

We started with D3 and a few other tools, but felt that we get a lot more out of the box with ECharts, like interactivity and an events API. ECharts is also a lot more extensible than people give it credit for.

If anyone is curious, we documented the process of selecting a charting library after assessing several options: https://github.com/evidence-dev/evidence/issues/136

That fiddling used to drive me nuts in any of the tools I used to work with. It's part of the problem I'm trying to solve with my current open source project (evidence.dev) where we're tackling viz-as-code. You might find it interesting.

Previous HN discussions:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35645464 (97 comments)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28304781 (91 comments)

I spent 5 years leading a data team which produced reports for hundreds of users.

In our team’s experience, the most important factor in getting engagement from users is including the right context directly within the report - definitions, caveats, annotations, narrative. This pre-empts a lot of questions about the report, but more importantly builds trust in what the data is showing (vs having a user self-serve, nervous that they’re making a decision with bad data - ultimately they’ll reach out to an analyst to get them to do the analysis for them).

The second most important factor was loading speed - we noticed that after around 8 seconds of waiting, business users would disengage with a report, or lose trust in the system presenting the information (“I think it’s broken”). Most often this resulted in people not logging in to look at reports - they were busy with tons of other things, so once they expected reports to take a while to load, they stopped coming back.

The third big finding was giving people data where they already are, in a format they understand. A complicated filter interface would drive our users nuts and turned into many hours of training and technical support. For this reason, we always wanted a simple UI with great mobile support for reports - our users were on the go and could already do most other things on their phones.

We couldn’t achieve these things in BI tools, so for important decisions, we had to move the work to tools that could offer text support, instant report loading, and a familiar and accessible format: PowerPoint, PDF, and email. Of course this is a difficult workflow to automate and maintain, but for us it was crucial to get engagement on the work we were producing, and it worked.

This experience inspired my colleague and I to start an open source BI tool which could achieve these things with a more maintainable, version controlled workflow. The tool is called Evidence (https://evidence.dev) if anyone is interested.

I'm one of the maintainers of Evidence.dev - happy to answer any questions here

It's easy to embed a production Evidence site into other apps/sites (can use an iframe), but it's a bit trickier to get that working behind auth.

We can help you figure out if it's feasible - let me know and we can set up some time to chat: sean at evidence.dev

We have support for duckdb (and CSVs and Parquet through duckdb). We don't support python, but some people have also told us they have used evidence as the front-end for a python project - used python to do data transformation and calculations, then dumped the results into a duckdb file in an evidence project and built the visuals and narrative in evidence.

"Containerized" approaches with evidence are also quite interesting - lets you combine several tools and use evidence as the last mile. Here's a great example: https://github.com/matsonj/nba-monte-carlo

Quarto's a great tool, but I think it would be hard to maintain it as a reporting solution for a company. My co-founder Adam and I used to love using RMarkdown in our previous job, but found that as we tried to scale that in our team, it became unmaintainable. Keeping the tool limited to SQL, markdown, and components is a way to help data teams maintain a project across a large organization.

We also think that reporting outputs should have a very high bar for visual appearance, and it takes quite a bit of work in Quarto to get charts up to that standard of quality. It sounds like a nice-to-have feature, but in our experience, publication quality data viz is a very important way to build trust with businesspeople who read the reports. We spend a ton of effort thinking through design choices at Evidence and want to give data teams a library of components they can pull off the shelf and write in a simple, declarative syntax.

It doesn’t support MSSQL yet, but several people have requested it, so it’s definitely something we’ll support. We accept open source contributions for anyone who wants to add a database connector (a few of our connectors are open source contributions) - as long as there is an npm package for connecting to a database, setting up the connector is fairly straightforward.

Thanks for the feedback. There’s some info under Data Sources in the Core Concepts section, but maybe we should make the db support more prominent in the docs: https://docs.evidence.dev/core-concepts/data-sources/

The db connections are set up in the Settings page when you spin up an Evidence project, so we’ve also left a lot of the documentation in the product itself.

Haha I guess I should avoid using numbered lists

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

That's fantastic to hear - thank you! Looking forward to checking out your overview

This is getting quite a bit more attention than we expected.

For HN readers who are interested, we are currently building a hosting, deployment and auth service for Evidence projects - Evidence Cloud.

Evidence Cloud is currently onboarding customers in private beta - for early access, join the waitlist here: https://du3tapwtcbi.typeform.com/to/kwp7ZD3q

We have a mailing list you can sign up to at the very bottom of our website. We haven't sent much to date, but we are about to start sending consistent updates, so it's a good time to sign up.

There are also a few other great ways to keep up to date (Slack, Twitter, and Github) - links here: https://docs.evidence.dev/community

When you try it out, please reach out - would love to hear any feedback

Thank you for the kind words! Really glad you enjoyed using it

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.

We care a ton about making reports look beautiful. At the moment, we have some interactivity through data viz components (tooltips, sorting, etc.), but we have a collection of much more interactive features on our roadmap. Here are a couple examples of production Evidence projects: https://evidence-demo.netlify.app/ https://mdsinabox.com