Evidence vs Grafana
| Tagline | Code-based BI: build data reports and dashboards with SQL and Markdown | Observability and analytics dashboards for metrics, logs, and time series |
| Category | BI & Dashboards | BI & Dashboards |
| Replaces | Tableau, Looker, Power BI | Tableau, Power BI, Datadog |
| GitHub stars | 6.9k | 77k |
| Language | JavaScript | TypeScript |
| License | MIT | AGPL-3.0 |
| Self-host difficulty | 2/5 Easy | 2/5 Easy |
| Deploy options | Docker Manual One-Click | One-Click Docker Docker Compose Kubernetes Manual |
| Managed hosting | ||
| Last updated | 4 days ago | yesterday |
| View repo | View repo |
Where each falls short
The honest trade-offs — what you give up with each, versus the proprietary tools they replace.
Evidence
- Code-first workflow excludes non-technical, point-and-click business users
- Not designed for interactive ad-hoc exploration; reports are authored, not browsed freely
- No drag-and-drop visual builder or pivot-table exploration like Tableau/Power BI
- Limited governance, permissions, and live-querying features compared to enterprise BI
Grafana
- Oriented toward time-series and observability, not ad-hoc business analytics or pivot-style exploration
- No business-friendly visual query builder; dashboards assume knowledge of data sources and query languages
- Weak at relational/tabular BI reporting compared to Tableau or Power BI
- No semantic modeling layer; data modeling lives in the underlying sources
Bottom line
Both are a similar lift to self-host; choose Grafana for the larger community and ecosystem. Grafana has seen more recent development. Open each guide below for deploy steps and the full feature gap.