Evidence vs Qlik Sense

Evidence is an open-source business intelligence framework built around the idea of BI as code. Analysts write reports as Markdown files with embedded SQL queries and ready-made components for charts, tables and big numbers, and Evidence builds them into a fast static website. The project is MIT licensed and backed by a venture-funded company that also runs a hosted service.

Evidence connects to common warehouses and databases including Snowflake, BigQuery, Databricks, Redshift, Postgres, MySQL and DuckDB, as well as CSV files. Query results are cached and processed in the browser with DuckDB, so pages stay quick once built. Templated pages generate one report per customer, region or product from a single file, loops and conditionals add logic, and everything lives in git, so changes go through pull requests and code review. The open-source framework is free to self-host; Evidence Cloud adds managed builds, hosting, scheduled refreshes and authentication.

Evidence fits data teams that already think in SQL and git and want polished, reproducible reports such as board packs, KPI sites or customer-facing data pages. It is not a self-serve tool for business users who want to drag fields onto a chart. Metabase and Looker Studio are better for ad hoc exploration, Lightdash builds BI directly on dbt models, and Observable Framework is the closest alternative for code-first data apps with more JavaScript flexibility.

Qlik Sense is the analytics product of Qlik, a company founded in Lund, Sweden in 1993 and now headquartered in Pennsylvania, USA, under Thoma Bravo ownership since 2016. Its core job is self-service dashboards and data exploration built on the associative engine, which keeps every value in a model linked so that each click shows both related and excluded data instead of running a fixed SQL drill-down.

Today it is sold mainly as Qlik Cloud Analytics, with a client-managed edition still available for on-premise deployments. Capabilities include interactive apps and dashboards, a load-script data layer, report automation, Qlik Predict for AutoML forecasts, and Qlik Answers for conversational questions over both dashboards and documents. Cloud plans are priced by data capacity rather than seats: Starter covers 10 users and 10 GB, while Standard and higher add capacity in 25 GB packs and do not charge for additional users.

Qlik fits data teams that model data from many sources (including SAP) and want governed apps for hundreds of business users. It is heavier to learn than Power BI, whose per-user pricing is far cheaper for Microsoft shops, and less design-flexible than Tableau for visual storytelling. Small teams that only need charts over one database will find Metabase or Looker Studio simpler.

In February 2026 Qlik made its agentic experience in Qlik Cloud generally available through Qlik Answers, together with an MCP server that lets assistants such as Claude query governed Qlik data; a Discovery Agent that flags anomalies followed in the rollout.