Such a huge landscape of BI and data visualization tools. Are there any clear open source leaders? Apache Superset?
I work on an open source code-based BI tool called Evidence, which might be of interest to you.
It's effectively a static site generator aimed at building automated reports and analysis.
https://github.com/evidence-dev/evidence
Previous discussions on HN:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28304781 - 91 comments
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35645464 - 97 comments
I want to be able to publish this notebook when I’m done and then be able to hand that around, the same concept that you’ve built Evidence around. I think that’s a very good idea, so thanks.
The main thing keeping me from switching is that Metabase’s query builder and visualizations are too good for 95% of my work. It’s hard to picture going back to writing _all_ the SQL.
I hear that. We're making a lot of progress on reducing the amount of sql you need to write, keeping it DRY etc. Making the dev experience really buttery and high leverage is definitely a priority.
Here are a few of the things we're working on in that regard:
1. Making our components issue their own queries so that you don't need to write full sql expressions, just fragments when you're defining the chart you want.
2. Improving intellisense -- right now you get "slash commands" and snippets in our vscode extension to invoke components (which are really sweet), but we're aiming to get to a full intellisense type of experience.
3. Supporting external metrics layers where it makes sense. We've got some users using Cube, we're interested in Malloy, and the dbt semantic layer, those types of things.
One of our team members is very keen on building something he calls "Evidence studio", sort of a wsywig you could invoke during development for generating basic queries, setting up charts etc. that syncs the components into their text representation. That'd be further off though :)
For anyone who is interested in our cloud service, it's an easy way to put your project online, keep it up to date with your data, and place it behind access control.
For many organizations, hosting Evidence in their own infrastructure is easy enough, but if you don't want to manage that, we are happy to manage it for you.
It is not free (that's how we pay the salaries), but pricing is available here:
Superset looked good, but operating superset quickly runs into the same Python issues all Python software suffers from.
Sometimes it would just break for no apparent reason. Configuring it was a nightmare of magic Python code and unclear settings. Trying to use plugins was equally painful: due to the poor boundary separating the applications dependencies from the plugins dependencies, adding a db connector could just bork the whole application.
https://github.com/apache/superset/issues/13345
Almost instantly run into this issue setting up a test instance of Superset. And the issue has been around for years.