Happy Valley

Evidence vs ThoughtSpot

Evidence and ThoughtSpot are both BI & dashboards tools. Evidence is aimed at developers, while ThoughtSpot is aimed at enterprise and small businesses. ThoughtSpot costs less, from $25/mo versus $2500/mo for Evidence. Both have a free plan.

Evidence

BI as code: Markdown + SQL to reports

ThoughtSpot

Search and AI agent analytics platform for self-service BI teams

PricingOpen source · $2500Freemium · $25
Starting price$2500/mo$25/mo
Free planYesYes
Free trial30 days14 days
Built forDevelopersEnterprise, Small businesses, Developers
Platformswebweb, ios, android
CountryCA · 2021US · 2012
Rating——

Choose Evidence if

Analysts comfortable with code.

  • Version-controlled reporting
  • Beautiful output
  • Developer workflow

Look elsewhere if: Business users wanting self-serve.

Choose ThoughtSpot if

Mid-sized and large companies with a modeled cloud data warehouse that want hundreds of business users to self-serve answers.

  • Search-first design lets non-analysts answer ad hoc questions themselves
  • Queries run live against the warehouse, so there is no extract to refresh
  • Strong embedded analytics story with a free tier for developers

Look elsewhere if: Small teams on spreadsheets or a tight budget that just need a few dashboards (Power BI, Metabase, Looker Studio).

Evidence vs ThoughtSpot pricing

Evidence

  • Open source$0MIT-licensed framework, self-build (GitHub)
  • Team$2,500/moUnlimited users, 20K AI credits/mo, Analytics Agent
  • EnterpriseCustomAnnual contract, SSO, SCIM, embedding, self-deploy

ThoughtSpot

  • Free (Embedded)$0Embeddable dashboards, API and SDK, up to 10 users, 25M rows
  • Essentials$25/user/moBilled annually; 5 to 50 users, up to 25M rows
  • Pro$50/user/moBilled annually; Spotter AI, up to 1,000 users, 250M rows
  • Usage-based$0.10/creditUnlimited LLM tokens, Analyst Studio, up to 1,000 users
  • EnterpriseCustomUnlimited users and data, per-user or usage-based

Evidence · Key features

  • Markdown + SQL reports
  • Components for charts and tables
  • Git version control
  • Static site builds
  • Templated pages
  • Cloud hosting

Cons

  • Requires SQL and Markdown
  • Not drag-and-drop
  • Smaller community

ThoughtSpot · Key features

  • Spotter AI analyst answers natural-language questions over live warehouse data
  • Liveboards: interactive dashboards with drill-down and automated insights
  • Analyst Studio notebooks for SQL, Python and R, from the Mode acquisition
  • Live query connections to Snowflake, Databricks, BigQuery and Redshift
  • Semantic modeling layer that defines metrics and joins once for every user
  • Embedded analytics with REST API, Visual Embed SDK and a free developer plan

Cons

  • Answers are only as good as the semantic model, which takes real setup work
  • Paid tiers are billed annually, with no month-to-month option listed
  • Spotter usage on per-user plans is capped at 25 queries per user each month

Evidence vs ThoughtSpot: FAQ

Which is cheaper, Evidence or ThoughtSpot?

ThoughtSpot starts at $25/mo and Evidence at $2500/mo. Both prices are checked on the vendors' own pricing pages.

Do Evidence and ThoughtSpot have a free plan?

Yes, both Evidence and ThoughtSpot have a free plan; paid plans add more usage and features.

Which is better for small businesses, Evidence or ThoughtSpot?

ThoughtSpot lists small businesses as a core audience, while Evidence is aimed more at developers.

Not sure yet?