Visivo vs Evidence: Price, Semantic Layer, and Fit

Visivo and Evidence start from the same belief: analytics should live in a repository, as code, and go through review like any other change. If you have already decided on BI as code, both are serious options. The biggest practical difference today is what you pay to host it for a team. Evidence's hosted Team plan is $2,500 a month. Visivo's Platform plan is $500 a month, both flat, both with unlimited users. Visivo also has a free hosted tier, and Evidence's hosted product starts with a 30-day trial instead.

This post compares the two honestly, including where Evidence is the better pick. Pricing was checked against each vendor's public pricing page on November 4, 2026.

Want to try Visivo while you read? Install the open source CLI with curl -fsSL https://visivo.sh | bash (or pip install visivo), or start free in Visivo Cloud with $30 of credit and no card.

The short version

• Pick Visivo if you want a hosted, code-first BI tool for a whole team at one fifth of Evidence's hosted price, a semantic layer with declared joins between models, and a visual builder that writes back to the same YAML your engineers review.
• Pick Evidence if your reports are mostly written narrative in Markdown with SQL blocks, you already run Evidence's open source framework, or you need something Evidence sells and Visivo does not yet: a Slack bot, embedding with white-labelling, external viewers, row-level access rules, or a SOC 2 report.

Side by side

Price: the same promise at one fifth the cost

Both vendors made the same good decision: no per-seat pricing. Invite the whole company and the bill does not move. That is the right model for BI, because the people who most need a dashboard are often the people who open it twice a month.

The difference is the number. Evidence's Team plan is $2,500 a month. Visivo Platform is $500 a month, or $5,000 a year billed annually. Over a year that is $30,000 against $5,000 to $6,000 for the same shape of offer: one flat price, unlimited people, hosted dashboards built from code.

Both have usage on top, and you should count it. Evidence includes 20,000 AI credits a month and charges $0.01 per credit after that. On Visivo, conversations with the AI agent and scheduled builds draw on a credit balance that Platform discounts by 20%. Reading dashboards, exploring, and inviting people cost nothing on Visivo.

The other difference is how you start. Visivo has a free hosted tier that never expires: $0, $30 of credit to begin, no card. Evidence's hosted product begins with a 30-day trial of the Team plan, and its pricing page lists no free hosted tier. (Evidence Core, the open source framework, is free to self-host, and so is the Visivo CLI.) See the Visivo pricing page for every tier.

Authoring: Markdown reports or a YAML project

This is the most important product difference, and it should drive your choice more than price does.

Evidence treats a report as a Markdown page. You write prose, drop in SQL blocks, and place components that render the results. It is an excellent fit for narrative work: a monthly business review, a research write-up, a page where the words matter as much as the charts.

Visivo treats analytics as a project. Sources feed models, models carry metrics and dimensions, insights turn them into charts, and charts land on dashboards. Every object is defined once in YAML and referenced by name, so a change to a model flows to every chart that depends on it. Here is a small but complete example in Visivo 2.x syntax:

sources:
  - name: warehouse
    type: duckdb
    database: local.duckdb

models:
  - name: orders
    sql: SELECT * FROM orders
    source: ${ref(warehouse)}
    metrics:
      - name: revenue
        expression: SUM(amount)
    dimensions:
      - name: order_month
        expression: DATE_TRUNC('month', ordered_at)
  - name: customers
    sql: SELECT * FROM customers
    source: ${ref(warehouse)}

relations:
  - name: orders_to_customers
    join_type: left
    condition: ${ref(orders).customer_id} = ${ref(customers).id}

insights:
  - name: revenue-by-segment
    props:
      type: bar
      x: ?{ ${ref(customers).segment} }
      y: ?{ ${ref(orders).revenue} }

You do not have to write that by hand. Visivo's visual builder lets someone drag and configure the same objects in the browser, and every edit saves back to that YAML as a reviewable diff. Engineers work in code, analysts work visually, and both are editing one project.

If your team wants narrative reports, Visivo 2.2 added template dashboards: you write an HTML layout and place project items into named slots. It closes some of the gap, but if Markdown-first writing is the heart of your workflow, Evidence is built around it.

The semantic layer

Evidence added a metrics layer in July 2026: metrics defined in metrics/*.yaml and referenced from charts and tables. That is a good step, and it is new.

Visivo's semantic layer has three parts. Metrics are aggregate definitions such as revenue. Dimensions are row-level fields such as order month. Relations declare how models join. Once orders_to_customers exists, an insight can put revenue from orders against a segment from customers without anyone writing the join again. Metrics can also be defined at the project level and combine metrics from several models. The Metric reference covers the syntax.

If the main reason you want BI as code is that every team should get the same number for "revenue", look closely at how each tool models joins, because that is where numbers drift.

Drafts, branches, and review

Both tools take review seriously. Evidence Studio has branches, a commit button, and pull requests that get a preview link. Changes in the Studio editor sit in a shared working state until someone commits them.

Visivo works the same way in spirit. Edits in the editor, whether made by a person or by the agent, land as drafts. You see the pending changes, then commit or discard them. In Visivo Cloud, a branch maps to a git branch in your linked repository, so commits from it push to that branch and merging the default branch deploys it.

Call this one close. Choose on the other criteria.

AI: both have it

Do not let anyone tell you one of these is the "AI one". Evidence ships an analytics agent, a Slack bot, and a hosted MCP server that lets Claude, ChatGPT, and other clients query your workspace as the signed-in user. Those are real strengths, and the Slack bot in particular is something Visivo does not have.

Visivo's agent works inside the project. It reads existing objects, validates a proposed change against the schema, and writes it as a draft that a person reviews and commits. It cannot commit, deploy, or delete on its own. Local visivo serve also exposes an MCP server at /api/mcp/, so Claude Code or another MCP client can use the same project tools. Locally you can bring your own model key; in Visivo Cloud, agent conversations draw on credit.

Who should pick Evidence anyway

Be honest about fit. Evidence is the better choice if:

• Your output is narrative. Reports where the writing is the product fit Markdown with SQL better than a dashboard grid.
• You already run Evidence Core and are happy with it. Moving to Visivo means rewriting pages as a YAML project.
• You need a Slack bot, so people can ask questions where they already work.
• You need embedding with white-labelling or external viewers. Evidence sells these on Enterprise. Visivo's embedding is still in beta.
• You need row-level access rules or a SOC 2 report today. Evidence lists both on Enterprise. Visivo is not yet SOC 2 certified.

Who should pick Visivo

Visivo is the better choice if:

• You want hosted BI as code for a team and $2,500 a month is hard to justify. Platform is $500 flat, with unlimited members.
• You want to start free in the cloud, not on a 30-day clock.
• You care most about consistent numbers and want metrics, dimensions, and declared relations in one layer.
• Your team mixes engineers and non-engineers. The visual builder and the YAML are the same project, so nobody waits on someone else to make a change.
• You build on dbt™. Visivo layers on your dbt™ models and connects to ten source types, including Snowflake, BigQuery, Postgres, Redshift, ClickHouse, and DuckDB. See sources and dbt™.

Try Visivo

Install the CLI and build your first dashboard locally:

curl -fsSL https://visivo.sh | bash
visivo init
visivo serve

Or start free in Visivo Cloud: no card, $30 of credit to begin, and Platform at $500 a month when your team is ready. The pricing page has every tier, and the product overview walks through each capability.