Best app for making web charts?

February 28, 2007 2:21 PM

Thoughts on apps for making web charts (FusionCharts, Swiff/GlobFX, Dundas, Aspose, PopCharts, etc.)?

I'm looking for the most powerful tool for creating interactive charts. I want fast, flexible charts that plot a lot of data and let the user mess with the chart (zoom in, flip the axis, add series, etc.) on the fly.

I haven't been able to find any discussion of pros and cons ... Google searches turn up FusionCharts, Swiff/GlobFX, Dundas, Aspose, PopCharts, TeeChart, FlashCharts Pro, WebCharts3D, and Xcelsius among others, but I have way to distinguish between them. Thoughts?

posted by geremiah to technology (5 comments total)

The charting toolkit in OAT is hell of sick. What yahoo manager can resist a pivot chart?
posted by boo_radley at 4:32 PM on February 28, 2007

Holy crap synchronicity. I just spent the whole day reseaching this.

In my case, I wanted/needed something that played nice/easily with coldfusion so my results may not jive with your requirements, but I will say that WebCharts3D is super expensive. I didn't need to let the user mess about with the chart on the fly or have charts display in flash. For my application, the charts end up being dumped into a pdf anyways, so ChartDirector was the way to go, but ymmv.

WebCharts3D wouldn't do dashed/dotted lines nor custom icons for scatter plots which I needed. ChartDirector costs $100 for a single server license, WebCharts3D starts at $3800 for the Enterprise Edition server license. Kind of a no-brainer in my case.
posted by juv3nal at 4:55 PM on February 28, 2007

At my company we use dotnetCHARTING (www.dotnetcharting.com) with asp.net. The charts support very basic user interaction (drill-through, adding series, etc). The disadvantage is that I believe it only works with the .NET framework. The charts really do look beautiful on the page, and that has done a lot for us in helping to sell our product.
posted by sherlockt at 7:10 PM on February 28, 2007

XML/SWF Charts
Build a Better Charting Engine Using Flash and XML
Plotr (charting framework for Prototype)
posted by kirkaracha at 7:22 PM on February 28, 2007

Oh, yeah, I've used the maani charts before (kirkaracha listed them as XML/SWF Charts) and they're quite nice, if you can justify using flash components.
posted by boo_radley at 3:11 PM on March 5, 2007