Data visualization is an essential tool for data analysts, scientists, statisticians, and other professionals who need to make sense of large amounts of data. There are a variety of data visualization tools available, each with its own strengths and weaknesses. In this article, we'll take a look at some of the best options out there, including Google Charts, Tableau, Grafana, Chartist, FusionCharts, Datawrapper, Infogram, ChartBlocks, and more. Google Charts is a powerful and easy-to-use JavaScript library for creating web and mobile dashboards. It offers a wide range of chart types and supports integration with popular JavaScript frameworks such as React, jQuery, React, Ember, and Angular.
It also supports server-side programming languages such as PHP, Java, Django, and Ruby on Rails. Chart.js is another popular JavaScript library for creating simple yet flexible graphics. It's open source and offers eight different chart types that can be animated and interacted with. Chart.js uses HTML5 Canvas for outputting graphics which makes them look great in all modern browsers. The graphics created are also responsive so they're ideal for creating visualizations suitable for mobile devices. Chartist.js is a free and open source JavaScript library that allows you to create simple yet highly customizable and compatible graphics with multiple browsers.
The entire library takes up only 10 KB when compressed in GZIP. The graphics created with Chartist.js can also be animated and extended with plugins. Chartist.js is a great choice for designers who need simple embeddable and adaptable graphics with a small file size. Sigma.js is a single-purpose visualization tool for creating network graphics. It's highly customizable but requires some basic knowledge of JavaScript to use it properly.
The graphics created are integrable, interactive, and responsive so they're perfect for creating network visualizations that are suitable for mobile devices. Tableau is a powerful data visualization tool that can be used by data analysts, scientists, statisticians, etc., to quickly visualize data and gain insights from it. Tableau is well-known for its ability to collect data and produce the required data visualization result in a very short time while offering the highest level of security. Datawrapper is another popular data visualization tool created by a team of designers, developers, and journalists from several European countries as well as the United States. It's easy to use and supports a variety of visual styles while being capable of managing large volumes of data. Google Data Studio is part of Google's marketing platform and allows users to create multiple views of their data as well as dashboards instead of single visualizations ready for publication. Looker also provides connections to Redshift, Snowflake and BigQuery as well as more than 50 SQL-compatible dialects so you can connect to multiple databases seamlessly. Finally, it's important to remember that data visualization isn't just about creating beautiful charts and graphs; it also involves cleaning the data (formatting and checking errors), transforming it (changing from one format such as native Microsoft Excel to another such as XML), and making it available to external services such as web pages or BI tools you use.
