
Polychart.js: An Interactive Charting Library - polychartjs
http://www.polychartjs.com
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simonsarris
I currently develop a powerful JavaScript diagramming library (very different
capabilities than charting), and charge more than this, though its done per
domain and not per developer, with exceptions for OEM customers who need to
deploy it everywhere. I'd recommend you go that route instead, most of our
customers seem very happy with the model.

The charting space by contrast seems significantly bloated to me. This library
may well be awesome, but I'd recommend you explain within my first minute or
two on the page why this is better than the host of free options out there.

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recursive
The fact that you can pay for it is a competitive advantage for megacorps.

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solox3
$300 for a single developer, and the EULA says I can't transfer this license
to another person?

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xuexue
We'll be reviewing the licensing option per feedback from HN. Please send a
note to team@polychart.com, would love to hear more about what you think would
be reasonable :)

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Demiurge
In a world of so many wonderful free open source graphing libraries, it's hard
to see any reasonable licensing option for this. It might help if there was a
page that listed features that a developer could not accomplish for $300 in
flot, highcharts, or ndv3, or other popular options.

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pessimizer
Highcharts isn't free either, at least for commercial use.

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chaostheory
It's cheaper.

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Ecio78
Highcharts is cheaper if you use it for a single webpage (90$) but if you want
to use if for a real web app it's more expensive (590$ for a single
developer). Having said that, in my enterprise my dev colleagues use it and
they think it's a great product.

EDIT: if you host it for a personal/non-profit project it is free according to
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License

another product we've used in the past is Amcharts, good buy maybe not good as
Highcharts

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wheaties
Wow, these interactive charts are great. Can't wait to pay for something like
this unless there's already wonderfully interactive charting libraries out
there like nvd3 (<http://nvd3.org/>), dc (<http://nickqizhu.github.io/dc.js/>)
crossfilter (<http://square.github.io/crossfilter/>) or even anything from
d3's website (<https://github.com/mbostock/d3/wiki/Gallery>)

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venomsnake
And microsoft totally stopped selling and developing windows server when there
were two other awesome free server operating systems ...

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kolev
Yes, but Microsoft had more than 90% of the market already, not 0% like in
this case.

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JangoSteve
I like the interaction layer (at least the way it's described). The per-
developer pricing for this is really strange though. If I implement this in an
app, it may start out as my app, and then other developers may collaborate
later on, sometimes temporarily. How much would this cost? I have no idea, so
I'd probably skip it entirely for any project.

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fournm
Between this and the cost per developer, I don't think there's any way I could
ever justify using it.

It looks really nice, though, definitely good job.

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xuexue
Thanks fourm for the feedback! Let us know what you think would be reasonable
and email team@polychart.com for a discount for HN users. (And of course,
always free for non-commercial use)

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fein
Not a single mention of flotr2 in this thread? I'm not sure if I should be
mortified or impressed.

It's free, and I don't see many features added that flotr2 doesn't have.

<http://humblesoftware.com/flotr2/documentation>

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joseph_cooney
Agree - Flotr2 is awesome. To be fair this library seems to offer a little
more in terms of interactive charts, which I don't think FLotr2 does much (I
know you can kind of get 'selection' in pie charts, but I don't know of
anything else).

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fein
you can get 'selection' in bars with the mouse options. I've hacked in better
functionality before; it really is not difficult. Pretty much comes down to
modding the redraw on mouseclick.

I still cant see how this would justify a $300 price tag, but perhaps its the
FOSS philosophy taking over.

I dunno. I prefer to release anything I deem worthy of ridicule by the FOSS
community under wtfpl. Power to the people!

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bensedat
This looks quite awesome! As a quick suggestion, the wiki
(<https://github.com/polychart/polychart2/wiki>) recommends using github as
the CDN which I thought was highly discouraged. However I can't find any
official stance on this anymore..did it change?

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niggler
Take a peek at the headers:

    
    
        $ curl -I https://raw.github.com/Polychart/polychart2/develop/polychart2.standalone.js
    

You will see

    
    
        Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8
        X-Content-Type-Options: nosniff
    

This is a deadly combination: browsers may reject script tags with incorrect
MIME types if nosniff is set.

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bensedat
Ah, that solves that :) I've seen recommendations of using Github Pages
instead, but again I can't find any official Github stance on it. I'm guessing
they reserve the right to cut you off if you start using large amounts of
bandwidth.

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dominic_cocch
This is pretty cool, but $300 is a lot to pay, even for commercial use. There
are a lot of free client-side charting projects out there. Charts.js was a
recent one on HN: <http://www.chartjs.org/>

While this new one does offer interaction between charts, that wouldn't be too
hard to add into other existing free projects that have event systems to hook
into.

I'd say $50 - $99 would make it more worthwhile.

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halayli
How is it different/better than highcharts?

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jonahx
They offer a convenient way to dispose of your extra income

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modarts
Yes: how dare he attempt to monetize his efforts...

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jarek
This is a case where singular they would have come in handy...

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hmottestad
This uses Raphael. Which is awesome.

Alternatives to Raphael is d3.

Alternatives all together is NVD3. If you haven't seen this one, go check it
out.

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xuexue
Agrees with you that Raphael is very awesome. A difference between
Polychart.js and NVD3 is its flexibility: the way one can overlay charts, or
even plot any change in polar coordinates. (We took a lot of ideas from R and
ggplot2, something data scientists use).

We share your love with d3 also, which unfortunately will not ever work in IE.
So until the rest of the world catches up... ;)

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notjustanymike
Why wouldn't it work in IE?

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drewda
d3 produces SVG graphics, which aren't supposed by versions earlier than IE 9.

There are ways to turn d3's SVG output into a canvas element. Those earlier
version of IE also support VML, but I don't recall any quick ways of doing
from d3 output to VML off the top of my head.

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polychartjs
Please see [http://blog.polychart.com/2013/04/licensing-model-of-
polycha...](http://blog.polychart.com/2013/04/licensing-model-of-
polychartjs.html)

Polychart.js can now be licensed under a per-domain or per-company license. We
continue to offer discounts to startups (as we're one ourself!)

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timjahn
How do you enforce how many developers are using the library? Do they each
have a unique key that you cross reference with their IP?

Otherwise, why wouldn't people simply buy 1 license and have as many
developers as needed work on the codebase?

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xfour
This is awesome I particularly like the updating line graph,
<http://www.polychartjs.com/demo?dow_jones_animated> great work!

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nijiko
False. You do not support basic guides like highcharts, you are not the most
intuitive and interactive for the browser... yet.

It seems like this feature is the most overlooked, and it is one of their
strongest selling points. As you mouse along the chart regardless of your y
axis it has guides that will show the datapoint tooltip information closest to
your x axis if you have a line selected or have mouseover'd a line.

Your charting library is however well thought out, there are a few features
that I would be interested in seeing from morris.js and rickshaw.

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mturmon
Would like to see a demo with a larger data set size (say, zoomable scatter
plot with thousands of points). And an option to edit the demo in jsfiddle.

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shrikant
Quick note: you have a typo on the Licensing page, where it says "Commerical"
instead of "Commercial". Given the large font, it really stood out!

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namank
I bet big corp would pay the design firm designing their intranet big bucks to
buy this.

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polychartjs
Thanks for the comment and the feedback on the pricing. Please email
team@polychart.com for a discount or alternative model just for HN readers, or
if you have other feedback!

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philvb
This looks interesting, but what are the advantages of this over Vega, which
is free?

<https://github.com/trifacta/vega>

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oscilloscope
It's hard to evaluate when the projects are so new. It was a similar problem
with Crossfilter/Datavore/Data.js/Miso Dataset when they all came out.

If I had to pick, I'd go with Vega because I think it has the most potential
to develop a community around it. Especially as a bridge between Python/R and
D3.js through JSON. Think iPython notebooks, R Shiny, etc.

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HarshaThota
Perhaps this is not the right place but can you expand on the
Crossfilter/Datavore/Data.js/Miso Dataset comment?

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oscilloscope
They are all libraries for managing datasets with fast or convenient
filtering. Useful for linking visualizations together through a common data
model.

None have become as popular as d3.js though, so it's still hard to compare
them.

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MBlume
Am I the only one who assumed this was for constructing charts of who you're
in a relationship with, who they're in a relationship with, etc.?

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recursive
Apparently.

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jmgunn87
i would say not bad but the fact you are asking me to pay to use it when i can
have something like d3 is a bit of a joke

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jmgunn87
why is everyone these days so afraid of investing time? d3 is well worth the
time invested learning!

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josephfung
It's not about being afraid of investing time, but rather assigning more value
to time than the licensing fees.

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hcarvalhoalves
Really good, but the per-developer pricing model doesn't make sense. Just
stick to one price for commercial use.

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xuexue
Thanks for the feedback. We'll be reviewing the pricing model per the comments
from HN. Would love to hear more on what you think would make sense :)
team@polychart.com

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CosmicShadow
Great stuff from a great Waterloo team!

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mariusbutuc
How does this compare to HighCharts?

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Demiurge
Great, I'm definitely going to integrate it into a yet another PHP MVC
framework I will start tomorrow. Oh wait, its commercial?

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wensi
love it, the demo is great1

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amitgupta151
Sounds very interesting.

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mavlee
Great work guys!

