Same chart – 9 online charting tools
There are several amazing posts by Lisa Charlotte Rost, where she compares 12 charting libraries, 12 charting tools and then again 9 charting tools by creating the same chart again and again.
I believe I will not be the first one to plagiarize her, but here is my version – I am exploiting numerous charting tools available online. Imagine the situation – we want a beautiful and interactive chart on our website but have no knowledge of D3 or other fancy stuff, so, to pick a solution I am quickly trying them all and making a recommendation based on this experience.
Some rules:
- I will try to get as close as possible to the intended design and layout, except colour palette, where I will use defaults.
- I will use the lazy approach – if I am not able to solve some issue quickly, I’ll leave it unsolved.
- I’ll use the data input format that is most suitable for every single tool.
- Data will be prepared and cleaned in advance as much as is reasonable. (I will not format 0.152365845 as 15%)
- The result must be an embeddable chart with at least basic interactivity. That is why RAW graphs does not qualify here.
- The tool must be fully online, that is why Tableau does not qualify here.
- The tool must be code free, that is why Dygraphs or many other charting libraries do not apply here.
- The tool must be free to use, that is why Excel 365 does not apply here.
I’ve chosen a stacked bar chart for my test because:
- It is quite basic, I believe all the tools will have it. (I was right)
- It is slightly more sophisticated than the simple bar chart, I expect it to cause additional problems. (I was right)
- I like it.
I’ll evaluate each tool in 3 star scale on five criteria:
- Chart selection: ★ – only basic charts, ★★★ – lots of stuff you’ll never use.
- Options: ★ – few deviations from the default, ★★★ – full possibilities to fail in your own terms.
- Ease of use: ★ – hell, ★★★ – flow.
- Aesthetics: ★ – default excel, ★★★ – aesthetics.
- Free user friendly: ★ – paywall blocks vital parts, ★★★ – great without paying for public content.
This is a creative adventure and I am not very familiar with any of these tools. So, if I’m doing something not in the best possible way, feel free to correct me.
Let the fun begin.
Plotly
I’ve got an impression from other blogs that this one is the most popular tool online. Plotly is flexible, but this flexibility comes at the price of being a bit complicated to use. The “trace” concept follows the best practices of Grammar of Graphics, however, it might be difficult to grasp at first – especially when trying to apply data transformations. But hey, they have options for data transformations!
I could not make separate tooltips for every data point, so the chart seems a bit overcrowded on hovering.
Chart selection: ★★★
Options: ★★★ (even data transformations!)
Ease of use: ★★
Aesthetics: ★ (tooltips are weird)
Free user friendly: ★★★ (there are some limits on traffic and storage space)
Datawrapaper
Well, Datawrapper is eye-candy for sure! But see how labels at the bottom are not ok, I could not find a way to fix them. Also, the annotations are available only for line charts and scatterplots. But I love the way it highlights the category for every year!
At the time of making the chart, the website broke for a moment. I was lucky!
Chart selection: ★
Options: ★
Ease of use: ★★★
Aesthetics: ★★★
Free user friendly: ★★★
Everviz (Highcharts)
I’ve got an impression, that Highcharts is the most popular javascript charting library after D3. But their online version called Everviz was problematic. The simple settings are very limited, but advanced options are super complicated, I struggled to remove labels, and I am not sure if I removed them the right way. For such options a programmer is needed, and if a programmer is needed why to bother with an online tool?
I gave up adjusting the bar width (I wanted them wide) and seems that a long multi-line annotation is not allowed.
Chart selection: ★☆☆ (they even have radial bars, but on a paid plan only)
Options: ★☆☆ (there are lots of options I did not know how to use, but on a paid plan only)
Ease of use: ★
Aesthetics: ★★
Free user friendly: ★
Flourish
Is was really comfortable to work with it! Or maybe it’s just an impression after struggling with Everviz. But not everything is perfect, for example, the legend at the bottom is not what I want and those angled axis labels look strange when there is plenty of space for them!
I had a funny moment when due to some glitch the chart started twitching. I was still able to edit it and the twitching did not stop until I closed the app!
Chart selection: ★★★ (this is how they do bar chart races)
Options: ★★
Ease of use: ★★★
Aesthetics: ★★
Free user friendly: ★★★ (just everything is public)
Infogram
I like how Infogram made adding animations and effects easy. This tool is designed to make infographics, that is why the visual part is very strong here. However, I failed to format y-axis as percent. I still cannot believe this tool is unable to do such a basic thing, so I consider that I simply could not find this option. Also, the order of categories is the opposite on the legend.
But behold – an annotation!
Chart selection: ★★★ (lots of stuff, actually)
Options: ★★
Ease of use: ★★★
Aesthetics: ★★★
Free user friendly: ★★ (10 projects only)
amCharts
Update: At first amCharts had the possibility to embed the live chart, but now the only option is to create a HTML code using online chart maker. Also they have upgraded their chart maker from beta version. That makes all this section obsolete…
Fun fact– Infogram is Latvian company, and amCharts is Lithuanian. Baltic countries are seriously into dataviz.
Google sheets
Google is doing everything. There is even a Google version of typing in Japanese. So, we have Google Charts library, Google Data Studio dashboards and Google Sheets which to my surprise are capable to produce an embeddable chart!
I’d say the tool is too easy compared to everything that I have tried before, but also incredibly limited. One field where it shines is data manipulation – Google Sheets is a fully operational spreadsheet after all!
Chart selection: ★
Options: ★★ (additional star for data manipulation)
Ease of use: ★★★
Aesthetics: ★★
Free user friendly: ★★★
Looker Google Data Studio
This tool is made for making Business Intelligence dashboards, it’s Google’s version of Tableau. At first, it looked kinda basic, but then I discovered ways to add custom charts built by the community! However, there are not yet plenty of them.
Everything is quite simple and intuitive here except that the chart title must be added as a usual text field, and that the default values for embedded chart give scrollbars! But also, I managed to add annotation – there are definitely more visual options on Looker Studio than on Sheets!
Chart selection: ★★
Options: ★★
Ease of use: ★★★
Aesthetics: ★★
Free user friendly: ★★★
Visme
I’ve read on many “Best charting tools” lists that Visme is a very good option. At first, I was very disappointed with it, because it seemed to be made for presentations, and charting options were very poor, but finally, I found how to make those bars stack onto each other!
It is exceptionally good for visually rich materials (infographics), it is not made for charts, that is why there are plenty of possibilities to add an eye-candy, but not as much to edit the axes.
Update: The original visual is not available anymore on Visme servers. Too bad I did not make a snapshot of every visual.
Chart selection: ★ (even paid version is limited)
Options: ★★ (additional star for eye-candy options)
Ease of use: ★★
Aesthetics: ★★★
Free user friendly: ★ (5 projects only and everything is limited)
What is more
Why 9?
The majority of the tools used to make charts we see online are actually javascript libraries – a library must be downloaded and the chart must be coded in javascript. The number of such libraries is overwhelming and some of them have online editors (Plotly, Flourish, Highcharts, amCharts), but most of them do not, so I quickly ran out of online options to review and gave up the idea to have a nice round “10 online charting tools” in the title.
All nine tools reviewed in this article are selected due to relative popularity in similar “Best charting tools” articles, mentioned often in discussions, and I believe are well established. When trying to find the 10th tool to review I searched google and found 10 more tools. However, I decided not to pick any one of them, because I have no idea how to compare them without actually trying. I did not want to expand this article to 20 tools.
Pricing
I did not give stars for prices and did not say a word about them. Some tools are more powerful and more expensive, while some are simpler and cheaper. However, all of them have at least 3 tier pricing plans which, I believe are not easily comparable and are subject to change. So, if some reader wants to make a decision which tool to invest in, I strongly recommend comparing those plans on their actual websites.
May this article give a feel on how a chart made with very low effort looks like on every tool.
Data format
At one point I understood that an additional comment on data format is needed. Data comes in two main formats – wide (think excel table) or column (think columns in a database, also called “tidy” format). I expected most tools to accept .csv files in column format and Plotly (the first one I tried) did, but then I quickly understood, that the most widely accepted format is the wide one. The only other tool that worked with data in columns was Google Data Studio. I don’t know is this good or bad, but basically it means, that for most tools the data will always need to be prepared in a spreadsheet or other calculation software.
Regions
One may questions the division of the world into unconventional regions, where Oceania is grouped with North America. I believe they fit together really well since Australia is like the United States and Fiji is like Hawaii. Here is a map made in Flourish where you can see all those regions.
Recommendations
For myself, for further development of Chart Planet website I recommend using Datawrapper for very simple stuff, Plotly and Flourish for more complicated visuals (depending on which works better case by case) and Infogram for exceptional cases, because as for now, I have 9 shots left.
Here is the chart made in Datawrapper comparing all the tools.
Thank you for your attention!