Charting Tools
The software people build charts with, compared on the same criteria.
Tool finder
Describe your situation. Every tool is scored on the same seven criteria, weighted by what you pick.
- 1
Tableau80%BI platform · strong on interactivity and sharing - 2
Power BI75%BI platform · strong on interactivity and sharing - 3
Qlik Sense75%BI platform · strong on interactivity and sharing - 4
Plotly73%Code library · strong on interactivity and low cost - 5
D3.js66%Code library · strong on interactivity and visual control - 6
Looker Studio64%BI platform · strong on sharing and ease of use
Positioning map
Ease of use against visual control: the trade-off behind most choices. The finder’s top three are labelled.
Score matrix
Sort by any criterion. Fit follows your answers in the finder.
| Tool | ||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Tableau | 80% | |||||||
| Power BI | 75% | |||||||
| Qlik Sense | 75% | |||||||
| Plotly | 73% | |||||||
| D3.js | 66% | |||||||
| Looker Studio | 64% | |||||||
 Metabase | 61% | |||||||
 Looker | 59% | |||||||
 Vega-Lite | 59% | |||||||
 Amazon QuickSight | 57% | |||||||
 Apache Superset | 57% | |||||||
 Excel | 41% | |||||||
 ggplot2 | 32% | |||||||
 Matplotlib | 30% | |||||||
 seaborn | 30% |
BI platform
Power BI
Microsoft
Microsoft’s BI platform: model data in Power BI Desktop, publish interactive reports to the Power BI service and share them across Microsoft 365.
Tableau
Salesforce
A visual analytics platform built around drag-and-drop exploration, known for polished and highly interactive dashboards.
Qlik Sense
Qlik
A BI platform built on Qlik’s associative engine: every selection shows at once which values are related, and which are not, across the whole dataset.
Looker
Google Cloud
An enterprise BI platform centred on LookML, a modelling layer that defines metrics once and generates SQL against the database.
Looker Studio
Google’s free, browser-based dashboard tool (formerly Data Studio), strongest with Google Analytics, Ads, Sheets and BigQuery.
Amazon QuickSight
Amazon Web Services
AWS’s serverless BI service, with an in-memory engine (SPICE), usage-based pricing options and dashboards built to embed in applications.
Metabase
Metabase
Open-source BI where anyone can ask questions with a visual query builder or SQL, then save the answers to dashboards.
Apache Superset
Apache Software Foundation
An open-source BI platform first built at Airbnb, with SQL Lab for exploration and a large library of chart types.
Code library
Matplotlib
Open-source community (NumFOCUS)
The foundational Python plotting library: low-level control over every element of a figure, for static, publication-quality output.
seaborn
Open-source community
A statistical plotting library on top of Matplotlib: one call for distributions, regressions and grouped comparisons from a pandas DataFrame.
Plotly
Plotly
Interactive, web-based charts from Python, R or JavaScript, with Dash for turning them into complete analytical apps.
ggplot2
Posit and the R community
R’s implementation of the grammar of graphics: build any chart by layering data, aesthetic mappings and geometries.
D3.js
Mike Bostock and contributors
A low-level JavaScript toolkit that binds data to web graphics. Not a chart library as such, but the foundation of many, including several charts on this site.
Vega-Lite
University of Washington Interactive Data Lab
A declarative grammar of interactive graphics: describe a chart in JSON, or in Python through Altair, and the renderer does the rest.
Scores are an editorial judgement on a 1 to 5 scale, not vendor benchmarks. Logos are trademarks of their owners, shown only to identify each product.