

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

What are the best free and pay web charting libraries?
======
yish
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.

~~~
og1
There's also the flash based version called flare: <http://flare.prefuse.org/>
which I've found to work well.

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rmanocha
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.

~~~
ig1
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.

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kilian
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/>

~~~
fun2have
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.

~~~
kilian
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...](http://www.perceptualedge.com/articles/visual_business_intelligence/save_the_pies_for_dessert.pdf)

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graham_king_3
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.

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

~~~
nopassrecover
Wish I could find pictures on that site somewhere.

~~~
staunch
<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.

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nfriedly
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/>

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dmpayton
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/>

~~~
brisance
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.

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mark_story
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.

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revorad
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.

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atlantic
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/>

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

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

<http://amcharts.com/>

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

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quinto42
Hah, such bad replies.

<http://www.highcharts.com/>

No questions.

