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briefercloud / repository
Dashboards and notebooks in a single place. Create powerful and flexible dashboards using code, or build beautiful Notion-like notebooks and share them with your team.
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Here's a brief demo (no pun intended) of Briefer. It may take a few seconds to load.
https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/dfc6c1ef-f26c-44a9-8566-857178a8c5db
Briefer is like Notion for code notebooks and dashboards. It gives technical users all the flexibility they need to publish dashboards, analyze data, create reports, and build data apps. At the same time, Briefer makes it easy for non-technical users to view and interact with data.
In Briefer, you can:
In addition to all that, Briefer is also multiplayer, meaning two or more people can work on the same notebook or dashboard at the same time and see each other's changes in real-time.
The recommended way to run Briefer locally is to install it using pip and run it using the briefer command. Please note that Briefer requires Docker to run, so make sure you have it installed before running the commands below.
# Install Briefer
pip install briefer
# Run Briefer and access it on http://localhost:3000
briefer
If you run Briefer using pip, our initialization scripts will take care of downloading our docker image, setting up volumes to store Briefer's data, and starting the application.
Alternatively, you can also run Briefer using Docker directly:
# Run Briefer using Docker
docker run -d \
-p 3000:3000 \
-v briefer_psql_data:/var/lib/postgresql/data \
-v briefer_jupyter_data:/home/jupyteruser \
-v briefer_briefer_data:/home/briefer \
briefercloud/briefer
When running on Windows' PowerShell, it might be necessary to add an extra ` to the end of each line instead of the \, like this:
# Run Briefer using Docker
docker run -d `
-p 3000:3000 `
-v briefer_psql_data:/var/lib/postgresql/data `
-v briefer_jupyter_data:/home/jupyteruser `
-v briefer_briefer_data:/home/briefer `
briefercloud/briefer
These volumes are for Briefer to store its data, including its pages, dashboards, schedules, and users. If you want to remove Briefer's data, you can remove these volumes.
For more information on how to deploy Briefer in production, please refer to our deployment guide.
If you want to contribute to Briefer, please read our contributing guide which explains how run Briefer in development mode.
Briefer is a collaborative web application. Each instance of Briefer can have multiple users who share a workspace containing multiple pages.
Ideally, you'll deploy Briefer somewhere where your team can access it, like a server or a cloud provider. Once you have Briefer running, you can access it on your browser and start creating pages.
To fetch external data in Briefer, you can connect it to your databases, like PostgreSQL, BigQuery, Redshift, Athena, or MySQL. You can also upload any types of files and work with them as if they were on disk.
You can view each Briefer page as a notebook or a dashboard.
In the notebook mode, you can write SQL to fetch data, Python to manipulate or visualize it, and Markdown to document your analysis. You can also use native visualizations to create charts and tables without having to write code.
Then, in the dashboard mode, you can create dashboards by dragging and dropping the elements from your notebook. You can also add inputs, dropdowns, and date pickers to create interactive filters or data apps.
After you're done creating your notebook or dashboard, you can save your changes so that other users can see them.
Once a page is saved, you'll be able to schedule it to run periodically so that your dashboards and notebooks are always up-to-date.
There are two types of tools people usually compare us against. The first type is traditional BI tools like Tableau, Looker, or Power BI. The second type is notebooks like Jupyter, or Google Colab, whose results often get screenshoted and pasted in Notion or Confluence.
Here's how Briefer compares to each of them.
Briefer is better than traditional BI tools because it's faster and more flexible, thanks to Python.
Traditional BI tools often require you to write complex SQL queries to fetch data, and then limit you to a set of pre-defined visualizations. Most of the time, the only way to manipulate these visualizations is by clicking around the UI, which can be slow and error-prone.
Briefer supports SQL and no-code visualizations too, but it also allows you to write Python code to manipulate data and create custom visualizations.
This means you can do things like:
Additionally, many data and engineering teams end up splitting their work between a BI tool and a jupyter notebook. That makes it hard to keep track of what's happening and to collaborate effectively. In Briefer, you can do everything in one place.
We love notebooks, but there are three main problems with them:
The main problem with notebooks is that they're difficult to share and maintain, especially with non-technical people. Therefore, data scientists, analysts, and engineers often struggle to share their work and get the visibility they deserve within their organizations.
Usually, the only way to share a notebook is to take screenshots and paste them in Notion or Confluence. That workaround is not ideal because it's time-consuming, and the information quickly becomes outdated, especially when you need to update it.
Briefer solves this problem because every Briefer notebook is stored in a single place that everyone in your organization can access. Briefer's interface is also much more user-friendly than Jupyter, which makes it easier for non-technical people to view and interact with data.
In addition to Briefer's friendly interface, you can also choose which blocks of your notebook you want to publish, so you can keep your data jiu-jitsu private while sharing the relevant insights and visualizations with your team.
Currently, people who want to gather data in notebooks have to keep credentials in their machines, which is not secure. They also have to write a lot of boilerplate code to run simple queries. Sometimes, people create whole libraries to handle queries.
In Briefer, you can run SQL queries against connected data sources directly in your notebook. Then, Briefer will automatically turn your query into a data frame and store it in a variable that you can use in your Python blocks.
If you need to fetch data from an API, you can use Briefer's environment variables to store your credentials securely in a single place instead of handing them out to everyone in your organization.
Finally, in case you want to use files, you can upload them to Briefer and read them in Python or query them using SQL thanks to our DuckDB integration.
Besides our improved interface, Briefer integrates several UX improvements directly into your notebooks.
In Briefer, you can schedule your notebooks to run periodically. That way, you don't have to turn them into an ad-hoc script that you schedule with cron or Airflow. Each of these scheduled runs generates a snapshot that you can use to compare changes over time.
Finally, Briefer can generate code for you. If you're not sure how to write a query or a Python block, you can ask Briefer to generate it for you. Briefer will look at your database schema and your notebook's context to suggest changes. If you run into an error, Briefer can also suggest fixes.
Briefer is an application with three main components: the web, the api, and an optional ai service. These three components require a PostgreSQL database to store their data, and a jupyter server to run your code.