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Comment by dmattia | Hacker News Reader

I use a similar tool at my work (airplane.dev) that lets us make dashboards as code using raw SQL or a language of our choice. I love it, and it gets a ton of use from our engineers and customer support folks.

But our CEO, sales, etc. teams that are often consumers of BI tools do not like it, as they do not like SQL, nor putting things in code, nor markdown. So we kept the "traditional" BI tools and ETL shenanigans as well.

It's expensive to have both, but I don't think either fully replaces the other, and I don't regret going down the path we have at all. I think most folks are happy.

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We have built a cross between airplane.dev, retool and n8n. It's fully open-source: https://github.com/windmill-labs/windmill Compared to airplane.dev, our scripts are instantly deployed, run faster, and we are being deployed fully on prem air-gapped, and scale easily to large clusters. Our workflow builder is similar in features to a tool like temporal and can be used to run ETL on nodes with hardware acceleration. Last, our UI builder is more similar to retool so it feels similar to traditional BI tools to build dashboards.

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.

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

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.

> 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.

Glad to hear you have a good experience with it. I’m planning to evaluate it for my company’s use.

I think there’s an opportunity to integrate LLMs so that non technical users can build on top of it using natural language.

I'm one of the co-founders at Airplane - if you end up evaluating it, feel free to send me a note at ravi@airplane.dev if I can help.

> I think there’s an opportunity to integrate LLMs so that non technical users can build on top of it using natural language.

We're currently working on this!

If you can't even learn SQL what are you doing in a tech company?? Sounds like the kind of company that hires managers that don't understand what their engineers are doing.

Specializing in a role that doesn't require SQL very often, most likely.

Or like in my CEOs case, they know SQL and have a strong technical background, but would rather click around in a UI because they've become proficient in that UI over years of using a certain set of workflows.

They’re doing all the roles that allow developers like us to have a job.

There are lots of jobs even in tech companies that don’t require knowledge of SQL at all. That doesn’t make the skill set of those people any less valuable.

Making a company successful is so much more than just cobbling together a CRUD app and some fancy reports, yet many engineers are sadly so caught up in their hubris, they don’t get this.

What are the traditional BI tools?

PowerBI, Tableau

Tableau and Power BI are the most common off-the-shelf options these days, but a lot of especially large well-established businesses have bespoke solutions that they paid to have implemented sometimes a decade or more ago that are still chooching along just fine.

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