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chaostheory

It's too expensive and there are plenty of free alternatives like

http://c3js.org/

http://www.chartjs.org/

http://nvd3.org/

and plenty more

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If you are building a commercial product and 590$ is too expensive, I feel sorry for you.

In western countries you could get at most 2-3 man days for that money, I highly doubt that even the best coder could implement Highcharts in 3 days and provide support for it afterwards.

If all you want is one or two simple charts then I agree, it is a waste of money to buy something like Highcharts, but if you really need most of what it has to offer then it is a good investment.

I have integrated Highcharts into a commercial project and it was a success.

The pricing policy is more obnoxious than the price itself. $390 (or $590 for "maintenance and support") gets you the ability for one single developer to do any kind of work with it. The next tier is $1,500 (or $2,250 for "maintenance and support") and gets you the ability for up to 5 developers to do any kind of work with it.

Having to pick between (A) sneaking around behind your vendor's back to violate their licensing terms by having more developers work on it than you paid for and (trivially) concealing that from them, (B) paying $1,500 instead of $590 (!) just so more people can legally work on it, and not even getting support, or (C) micromanaging your team such that literally only one human being can actually work on that part of the code base...

...makes for a real bad customer experience, which is surely to the detriment of sales.

As a freelancer, I disagree that the pricing is obnoxious, it seems like a fairly typical business model for programming components. I view the 1 developer licenses as more of a discounted version for one-man shops like myself.

If you were going to violate their license you just wouldn't pay for it at all. It's free for academic and noncommercial use and you can download the complete library right from their site.

Corporate environments tend to have tools to manage seat-based licensing and smaller companies only have a handful of developers anyway. Typically the number of developers who need to be working with a specific tool is known when you start the project you're buying a license for and upgrading your license isn't exactly tough. I convinced my boss to buy our department a 5 seat license for Highcharts (without support) after doing a pretty exhaustive search for free alternatives with all the features we need and it has been great so far.

Of course there are steps between (A) and (B) - you can choose to purchase two or three Single Dev licenses. If you need four Single Dev licenses, you are better off buying the 5 dev package.

Can't understand why people would downvote this, Highcharts is extremely inexpensive compared to the other costs that go into a commercial product that would require extensive charting and the gained productivity and savings in development time are incredible. Two years ago I migrated a ExtJS web app that had taken 2 years to build to Highcharts + Bootstrap in about a month or two. What amazed me was that for every ExtJS charting extension that had to be written on top of the existing facilities to create more complicated graphs there was a built in option for it in Highcharts or a simple extension in the community forums.

> Highcharts is extremely inexpensive compared to the other costs that go into a commercial product

Yes but Highcharts is extremely expensive compared to other alternatives which are free. Unless you're in the .NET world, no one really pays for libraries and frameworks anymore since the open source alternative is either better or just good enough.

At some point in the decision process you should be weighing the cost of buying software/support vs. the cost of developing it in-house. Highcharts is not expensive compared to developing something similar yourself, unless you have the luxury of a loose schedule and are being paid at something like $10 an hour.

I think the reason these "cost concerns" are being expressed is that a programmer isn't trained to weigh these things objectively. It's like going directly to a surgeon with an ailment and asking their recommended course of action. Their expertise is surgery, so their resolution is more likely to involve a knife.

> Highcharts is not expensive compared to developing something similar yourself,

Here's what you guys keep ignoring: there's other open source alternatives that are free. I'm not helping develop them beyond giving bug reports.

What you keep ignoring is that highcharts is way better than those alternatives, and that many people really like the simplicity of paying people for great products.

That may have been true 4-6 years ago. In 2014, that's no longer true.

That's one of those "It depends" situations. I've reviewed most of the charting libraries that have been posted in this thread and although yes they have come an extremely long way from 4 years ago when we picked Highcharts; all of them would still need a lot of work from our end to add extensions to be able to build all the charts we have in our products using built-in Highcharts options. But like I said it depends, a startup might not want to pay that money but that $3000 for 5 dev Highstock license is way less than the salaries needed for 5 devs to write the custom extensions in order to use something else to meet our needs.

Not sure which part isn't true in 2014 - that highcharts is way better than the competitors or that some people like the simplicity of paying money for things? For me, the first is less true than it was 4-6 years ago but still true and the second is more true than it was 4-6 years ago.

I'm sure your coding skills are great. Thanks for the downvote.

I didn't downvote you. I'm not sure you realize this but you can't downvote anyone in the same thread as you - at least I can't.

As a reference, I was able to move away from Highcharts and into one OOS library (rickshaw) in 2 man-days; I didn't have to reimplement it from scratch, I just had to find another lib.

To be fair, our charting requirements where not very complex.

1) As I've already said, High Charts isn't that much better than the free alternatives.

2) If you're bootstrapping, every penny counts.

3) It's not $590, it's $1500 (or more).

4) Not many people pay for libraries or frameworks anymore, when open source alternatives are either better or just good enough.

> 3) It's not $590, it's $1500 (or more).

Just wanting to point this out, but the price for a single developer, with support included, is currently $590 according to this page: http://shop.highsoft.com/highcharts.html

> 4) Not many people pay for libraries or frameworks anymore, when open source alternatives are either better or just good enough.

Not many, sure. But then again, they aren't going for lots of smaller people, but instead, fewer large companies. This is smart, since they are pushing support services as well.

>> 3) It's not $590, it's $1500 (or more).

>Just wanting to point this out, but the price for a single developer, with support included, is currently $590 according to this page: http://shop.highsoft.com/highcharts.html

OEM licence costs more than $1500.

Adding to the list, Contour is a recent open source library that is easy to use and extensible:

http://forio.com/contour/

it also has good documentation:

http://forio.com/contour/documentation.html

We (quite successfully) use flot http://www.flotcharts.org/ after I looked at highcharts' license and their "solution" for doing server-side rendering (some dodgy php).

The PHP script[1] is just a simple proxy to pass the SVG content to a well-regarded Apache Batik toolkit which then does the actual SVG->PNG conversion. I suspect PHP was chosen because of it is more readily available than any other backend tech among Highcharts clients.

Flot is a canvas-based library, so it can rely on modern browsers to rasterize canvas drawings to an image within the browser. Rasterizing SVG into an image directly within the browser is technically possible, but not supported across a wide range of browsers, so sending the SVG to the backend for conversion is a valid and very common technique.

[1] https://github.com/highslide-software/highcharts.com/blob/ma...

God forbid someone could get javascript environment running on a server.

Granted, it's not as lowest-common-denominator as php, but I personally ain't touching that stuff.

Other solutions are interesting, yes, but HighCharts is an incredible product with a LOT of features built-in. I've built a reporting tool on top of it and it covers a lot of use cases. Building the same visualization with another tool would require a lot of time, thought and iterations to make the API as simple.

For my use case, it's totally worth every single penny.

Chart.js is my current favourite - still doesn't have all the same features as Highcharts but usually sufficient for my needs.

It's been a while since I've used it, but I had to abandon Chart.js due to bad support for legacy browsers (even though it claimed the contrary). I haven't used Highcharts, but I've found flot to be pretty solid in cross-browser support.

None of those offer the features Highcharts does right off the bat.

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