Ask HN: What are the best free and pay web charting libraries? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What are the best free and pay web charting libraries?

17 pointsmatthodan21 comments

What are the best free and pay web charting libraries?

Protovis out of stanford (http://vis.stanford.edu/protovis/) seems to be incredibly comprehensive while also being really slick and interactive. Haven't had the chance to use it on a project but have it bookmarked since it would be the first thing I would try when I do. Also, seems to be updated regularly. I know they didn't support IE for a long time as they are SVG based, but not sure if that has changed.

There's also the flash based version called flare: http://flare.prefuse.org/ which I've found to work well.

I've been using the Google Chart Tools (http://code.google.com/apis/charttools/index.html) and have been pretty happy with it. Haven't used it on a major project though, so your mileage may vary.

I'm working on a project that does analytics on universities, and Google Chart is the only decent package I've found that meets my requirements.

A lot of these charting libraries use javascript or flash which is fine for user-specific data, but unsuitable for public data.

I need charts to be jpg/gif/png so people can easily copy them to blogs/forums/facebook. If I use javascript or flash charts I'll lose a huge amount of viral traffic.

I built Grafico, a free (MIT licenced) javascript and SVG charting library. it's fast in most browsers and should see a ridiculous speedup with ie9. Also it makes really pretty charts :) http://grafico.kilianvalkhof.com/

Grafico is really good but lacks pie charts. You have to use http://g.raphaeljs.com/ for Pie's. But that is not so bad as Grafico uses raphaeljs.

Not having pie charts is by design. Grafico attempts to adhere to the chart design principles by Stephen Few, amongst others, who has this to say about pie charts: http://www.perceptualedge.com/articles/visual_business_intel...

Flot. JS / Canvas library, supports excanvas for IE. Good looking, straightforward.

http://code.google.com/p/flot/

I have been using it for a while in production, am happy with it.

Open Flash Chart http://teethgrinder.co.uk/open-flash-chart-2/

Wish I could find pictures on that site somewhere.

http://teethgrinder.co.uk/open-flash-chart-2/area-hollow.php

The navigation is in the top right...it's pretty badly designed. The charts themselves are very customizable though, so you can mimic almost any nice chart you've seen by tweaking.

I've used the charts widget from YUI 2 more than once. It's not amazing, but if you have a small amount of data it gets the job done. Large data sets can take a while to render and then be hard to read once they do render.

http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/charts/

I've had good experience with ChartDirector. It can create many different kinds of charts and graphs, is very customizable, and comes with support for several languages.

Their website isn't much to look at, but the software is solid.

http://www.advsofteng.com/

Another vote for ChartDirector. The support forum is really active and the library itself has been licensed for use in a large number of commercial software.

If you like SVG, or even if you don't. http://g.raphaeljs.com/ has some sweet graphing. I wouldn't recommend it for huge data sets, but for small to large datasets its quite nice.

Hi matthodan, I'm building Pretty Graph (http://prettygraph.com), which is more of a complete web-based data visualisation app, not just a charting library. But we are also building an API, which might be of use to you. We also offer PDF downloads of graphs. Drop me an email (see profile) if you're interested.

I had some good experiences with DotNetCharting - for the .net framework, obviously. Easy to set up, charts are very classy, but a bit expensive.

http://www.dotnetcharting.com/

I have used fusioncharts and found it to be pretty awesome. http://www.fusioncharts.com/

I've used the free version of AM Charts. They look nice and work well.

http://amcharts.com/

I've used Highcharts with good results... http://www.highcharts.com/

Hah, such bad replies.

http://www.highcharts.com/

No questions.

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