13 Useful JavaScript Solutions for Charts and Graphs
Graphs and charts are used to simplify complex data and make it easy to read and understand. So it really wouldn’t make sense if it was difficult to integrate a graph into a website. Thanks to Javascript and a bunch of talented developers, we have at our disposal solutions for easily adding graphs and charts to our web projects. Here are 13 of these, including some written for jQuery and MooTools, that you will find very useful.
Highcharts
Highcharts is a charting library written in pure JavaScript, offering an easy way of adding interactive charts to your web site or web application. Highcharts currently supports line, spline, area, areaspline, column, bar, pie and scatter chart types.
JS Charts
JS Charts is a JavaScript chart generator that requires little or no coding. JS Charts allows you to easily create charts in different templates like bar charts, pie charts or simple line graphs. Moreover, JS Charts is free for non-commercial use.
PlotKit
PlotKit is a Chart and Graph Plotting Library for Javascript. It has support for HTML Canvas and also SVG via Adobe SVG Viewer and native browser support. PlotKit is fully documented and there is a quick tutorial to get you started.
jQuery Sparklines
This jQuery plugin generates sparklines (small inline charts) directly in the browser using data supplied either inline in the HTML, or via javascript. The plugin is compatible with most modern browsers and has been tested with Firefox 2+, Safari 3+, Opera 9, Google Chrome and Internet Explorer 6, 7 & 8.
jQuery Visualize Plugin
This plugin provides a simple method for generating bar, line, area, and pie charts from an HTML table, and allows you to configure them in a variety of ways.
jqPlot
jqPlot is a plotting and charting plugin for the jQuery Javascript framework. jqPlot produces beautiful line, bar and pie charts with many features.
milkchart
Milkchart is a simple to use, yet robust library for transforming table data into a chart. This library uses the HTML5 canvas tag and is only supported on browsers other than IE until ExCanvas gets proper text support.
Canvas 3D Graph
Canvas 3D Graph is a special type of bar graph that plot numbers in 3D.
Moochart
Moochart is a plugin for MooTools 1.2 that draws bubble diagrams on the canvas tag. Future versions might include pie, bar & line graphs.
TufteGraph
TufteGraph allows configuration by dynamic functions, allowing for a really compact API, and uses a non-core layout is done via CSS rather than code.
ProtoChart
ProtoChart is an opensource library using Prototype and Canvas to create good looking charts. This library is highly motivated by Flot, Flotr and PlotKit libraries.
flot
Flot is a pure Javascript plotting library for jQuery. It produces graphical plots of arbitrary datasets on-the-fly client-side. The focus is on simple usage (all settings are optional), attractive looks and interactive features like zooming and mouse tracking. The plugin works with Internet Explorer 6/7/8, Firefox 2.x+, Safari 3.0+, Opera 9.5+ and Konqueror 4.x+ with the HTML canvas tag (Internet Explorer where the excanvas Javascript emulation helper is used).
Protovis
Protovis composes custom views of data with simple marks such as bars and dots. Unlike low-level graphics libraries that quickly become tedious for visualization, Protovis defines marks through dynamic properties that encode data, allowing inheritance, scales and layouts to simplify construction.
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19 comments
Myo Kyaw Htun
February 9, 2010You missed out Google Visualization API … http://code.google.com/apis/visualization/
Jordan Walker
February 9, 2010Always a great way to present information to clients with charts.
Brian Egan
February 9, 2010I would add one more excellent option to this list: gRaphael (based on the Raphael JS Library).
http://g.raphaeljs.com
Jim Hanifen
February 9, 2010Great list, I love visualization. Highcharts really stood out to me.
Johnny
February 9, 2010Great post
New York Web Designer
February 9, 2010Thanks for putting together this awesome List…
I appreciate it
Nick Pettit
February 9, 2010There certainly are a lot of choices out there for charts and graphs. Thanks for posting this article, there were a lot here that I hadn’t even heard of.
We actually just did an episode about this not too long ago, over on Doctype:
http://doctype.tv/charts
Ajay
February 10, 2010Great post! Thanks.
SM
February 10, 2010Good collection. Thanks
Jerome
February 11, 2010Hey Guys, do you know some JS tools to display data on maps? I only heard about Google Vizualization API but maybe there’s more.
Aaron
March 2, 2010have a look at amMap http://www.ammap.com/
Aaron
March 2, 2010I can’t belive u left out amCharts
http://www.amcharts.com/
@Jerome have a look at amMap http://www.ammap.com/
Pete
March 12, 2010amCharts isn’t Javascript, it’s Flash.
Intiqab Rawoof
May 3, 2010Great Post…. Thanks!!
131bz
September 1, 2010Great post,but which one should I choose.
Richard
July 3, 2011Another is RGraph (http://www.rgraph.net) – it’s a canvas based charts implementation. Roughly 20 different base chart types supported and free for non-commercial use.
Siddharth
October 26, 2011Fusion charts isnt so bad either..but then again flash based
good for client presentations
http://www.fusioncharts.com/free/gallery/
Alex Sage
November 7, 2011and here is another javascript graphing library Active Graphs and Charts
http://www.jpowered.com/graph_chart_collection/
Full cross browser support including IE 6.0, 7.0, 8.0, Chrome, Firefox, Safari and Opera.
Jos
November 28, 2011Here is another javascript visualization library containing a timeline, graph, graph3d, network, and treegrid:
http://links.sourceforge.net
The library is open source and works in all browsers.