
Highcharts – JavaScript charting framework - ashwin_kumar
https://github.com/highslide-software/highcharts.com/
======
boomskats
We paid a lot of cash for Highcharts (Highstock actually) a couple of years
ago as an up-front investment for a process manager we were building - an OEM
licence. This was about a month's salary, straight after I quit my FT job. The
product is now ready to go live almost three years later, and there still
isn't a charting library, free or otherwise, that offers us the same
functionality that this did back when we licenced it.

Not to mention the fact that the CTO himself will fix bugs for you within a
week or so if you ask him nicely. Great company and great model. I don't get
how people can complain about the fact it costs money. The costs are passed on
to your client who will gladly pay for a better product, and you're supporting
the ecosystem. I'd have paid double what we paid.

~~~
capkutay
Can you comment on highcharts performance?

It looks like highcharts uses SVG under the covers. Canvas based
visualizations may fare a little better than SVGs once you're trying to render
thousands of data points.

~~~
seasoup
SVG performance degrades based on the amount of data that you are drawing. If
you are rendering basic charts you will never run into any issues, if you are
doing scatterplots with thousands of points or some other visualization with
lots of separate nodes then you run into performance issues.

Canvas performance is limited by the size of the canvas, the larger the
canvas, the more time it takes to redraw it.

SVG lets you tie into the DOM and DOM manipulation methods allowing for simple
event interactions. Interactive canvas can be done but is more time consuming
and difficult, though there are now canvas charting libraries that provide you
with some basic "click" or even "hover" functionality.

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simonw
Every page on that site returns a 200 status code, and the same content as the
homepage.

This means that
[http://www.highcharts.com/license](http://www.highcharts.com/license) (linked
to from GitHub) is currently failing silently - you get content, but it's not
the licensing information.

Note that
[http://www.highcharts.com/licenseoneutahenuo](http://www.highcharts.com/licenseoneutahenuo)
returns the exact same content again.

404s are useful! Don't disable them.

~~~
Koldark
You mean like: [http://mikewills.me/sucka/](http://mikewills.me/sucka/) ?
Jekyll and S3.

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sideproject
Highchart has been so good for our work we HAD to pay for it. We've looked at
almost every single charting library (mostly open source) but in the end, the
power & flexibility of Highcharts coud not be beaten.

Another awesome thing is their support. Ask a question on their forum or SO,
then you'll most likely get an answer with a working JSFiddle example either
from the community or the developers of Highcharts.

This is #1 on our JS library list.

~~~
jkulmala
+1 to this. I use Highcharts in my product and have saved much more work than
their licensing fee cost me.

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beermann
I like Highcharts a lot and we are paying for and using it, but be careful
with the licensing. Chances are you'll need to pay $390 for it unless you're
using it on a single domain, in which case it's $90. And that's for a single
developer. 5 developers and multiple domains = $1500 without support, and
there's nothing in between. And if you don't get the license and support you
don't get hotfixes and updates, which seems odd.

There are a lot of other charting libraries out there. Look at the licensing
before you commit to any of them.

~~~
program
According to the site the 90$ price apply when:

"For use on a simple webpage that is not considered a web application. A web
application is a website that has customer specific data or charges for its
use. This requires a Developer license."

[http://shop.highsoft.com/highcharts/highcharts-single-
websit...](http://shop.highsoft.com/highcharts/highcharts-single-website-
license.html)

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

[http://c3js.org/](http://c3js.org/)

[http://www.chartjs.org/](http://www.chartjs.org/)

[http://nvd3.org/](http://nvd3.org/)

and plenty more

~~~
voidr
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.

~~~
rtfeldman
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.

~~~
ryanackley
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.

------
areski
NVd3 ([http://nvd3.org/](http://nvd3.org/)) is the good opensource alternative
without the problem of highcharts licensing
[https://shop.highsoft.com/highcharts.html](https://shop.highsoft.com/highcharts.html)

~~~
j_jochem
The fluent API looks a lot nicer than highcharts' API. This is definitely
going on my shortlist of the next project that needs charts.

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barrystaes
I am a developer and i approve of this message. This is hands down the best
graph money can buy..

in a half-day test our webapplication suddenly was top-knotch, we immediately
payed them a licence.. it saved us over a week of workhours and it wouldn't
even be near half that good!

The configuration via the JS array is simple but extremely versatile, and the
(interactive) zoomable time-series graphs are my favorite. Another great thing
is that it supports image exports by our local (not always internet connected)
webapplication server.

------
pablobaz
Here's my plugin to integrate Hichcharts with AngularJS:

[https://github.com/pablojim/highcharts-
ng/](https://github.com/pablojim/highcharts-ng/)

------
Ecio78
We used it in my previous companies and our developers were very happy about
it. Previously we were using
[http://www.amcharts.com/](http://www.amcharts.com/) good product (but we
switched because at that time amcharts was flash only - I think), but my dev
colleagues told me that Highcharts was more powerful.

P.S. at that time (4-5 years ago) it was possible to use Amcharts for free in
commercial app but with reduced features (for example you couldn't handle a
click on the graph because in the free edition it would open their site) and
showing a link in the bottom of the chart. It seems it follows the same rule
now according to their download page, so consider it if you want a good free
charting library (I used also amMap and it was ok)

~~~
mdmullinax
I implemented amCharts earlier this year on an internal project. The version
we used is not rendered in flash. They use SVG (and VML for IE6-8 support).
Been very pleased with their look/feel and feature set. The documentation on
their site was organized and helpful. Concluded on amCharts as a result of a
personal analysis of eight charting libraries. amCharts does allow free (with
conditions, link) and pay options.

I think highcharts is a top contender but ultimately felt amCharts had better
aesthetics. The updated highcharts is certainly looking good.

(here was the analysis breakdown done in February 2014:
[http://i.stack.imgur.com/efgoR.png](http://i.stack.imgur.com/efgoR.png))

------
calewis
If you are working on a commercial product that you have to support its very
good value for money.

Saved us all time and effort and allowed us to focus on building other stuff,
without worrying about IE8 support. This is something which the other free
alternatives, generally, don't do very well.

------
jestar_jokin
Unfortunately, this isn't free for commercial use, so perhaps something like
Google Charts is more suitable (depending on your use case). There are
_plenty_ of alternatives out there.

~~~
iamshs
Will you be kind enough to list some examples please. I am working on some of
this stuff.

~~~
beermann
Chartist.js just had a lot of support on HN, although I haven't used it. I've
used Raphaël but customizing it can actually be a bit hard. Chart.js is
simple, easy to use, and just powerful enough for most cases.

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andreash
A fascinating thing about Highcharts is that they are located in a supertiny,
remote town in Norway called Vik. Only 2900 live there. Highcharts employ 10
people + a few remote workers.

You can read about this tiny remote place on the founder's personal webpage
here:
[https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=no&sl=no&tl=en&u=h...](https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=no&sl=no&tl=en&u=http%3A%2F%2Fvikjavev.no%2Fomvik%2F)

------
jasonwen
Have been using highcharts now for a few years. It's easy too start with, with
preset examples (but who wants default colors anyway haha). I had to write an
extra layer though to render charts more easily, directly from the dom.

Took quite some work but I don't want anything else now. Just set some data
attributes and I can create pie's, line charts, and bars all on the fly!

It almost never failed me to customize it, editability is good and API doc
extensive.

------
sigurdurf
4 years ago I had to make a small webapp that displayed sensor data with up to
20000 points. At the time this was the only graph library I found that could
handle so many points in a reasonable time, the library has some nice options
for quickly summarizing large dataset to a smaller subset for visualizing.

Possibly there are better alternatives today for such datasets, I haven´t
looked into it recently.

------
cturhan
The old youtube analytics page was using Highcharts I suppose and it was
styled well. Currently they switched Google Charts to visualize data. I'm not
sure because all the js code is obfuscated but when I look some values are not
obfuscated the functions remind me the variables in these libraries.

Edit: Yes, currently it is definitely Google charts now but I think it was
Highcharts in the past.

------
mamcx
A bit Offtopic: Somebody have used
[http://js.devexpress.com/WebDevelopment/](http://js.devexpress.com/WebDevelopment/)?
I between it and highcharts for a dashboard-type app for Desktop + IOS
browser.

I have used DevExpress before and is a good company but never the JS products.
Is less expensive and bundle a JS grid, that I need too.

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ejain
I'm using Highcharts for all the charts on
[https://zenobase.com/](https://zenobase.com/). There are a lot of open source
alternatives, but none I've seen so far handle axes labels as well as
Highcharts does out of the box (i.e. ensure that there isn't a mess of
overlapping labels).

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webmaven
[https://github.com/highslide-
software/highcharts.com/issues/...](https://github.com/highslide-
software/highcharts.com/issues/3405)

------
wcummings
Old news is old, but highcharts is GREAT! Worth paying for.

------
nothans
HighCharts + Internet of Things:
[https://thingspeak.com/channels/3](https://thingspeak.com/channels/3)

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corbinpage
I have absolutely loved using Highcharts on past projects. Just avoid the
headaches and use Highcharts.

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jackmoore
That's a lot of open issues…

~~~
wcummings
A lot of open issues means a lot of active users.

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minimaxir
Note that v4.0.4 was released today, which I assume is the reason for the
submission.

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naugtur
How is this news?

~~~
hnha
Hi and welcome to HN. HN is not just about news but also generally things that
its community considers worth reading/looking at. If you are only interested
in news, I would suggest you either find yourself a suitable news website or
execute the mental strength to skip over content you are not interested in.
Have a nice day!

------
akurilin
Thoughts on Highcharts vs Google Charts?

~~~
samdb
Google Charts is hosted, like
[https://app.chartblocks.com](https://app.chartblocks.com) \- you can download
or save the charts that get produced but it's not a charting library that can
be used offline. If you want hosted charts you've also got to give someone
access to your data.

