We have used data visualization in some way or other since time immemorial, from early cave paintings to today’s advanced information dashboards. The human eye is drawn to colors and patterns. Our brains crave visual information. In fact, according to MIT, “90% of the information transmitted to our brains is visual.”
Two years ago, I began to recognize the value of isolating insights and driving understanding by developing my visualization skills. But, when I looked at sophisticated vizzes like the ones above, I was worried that I needed to learn extensive coding and obtain training on premium dataviz tools. Instead, I discovered five free tools useful regardless of your coding prowess.
In this article, I review those five free tools by creating a viz in each one using same dataset: Number of Livestock Species of Karnali, Nepal taken from the Ministry of Livestock Development, Organizations on Open Data Nepal.
1. Tableau Public
Tableau is one of the world’s leading analytics platforms. Tableau Public is a popular visualization application that allows you to create a wide range of charts, graphs, maps, and other graphics. The visualizations you create can be conveniently inserted into any web page and can be shared with your friends, organizations, peers in the industry, and so on. Tableau’s public gallery contains a wide ranges of visualizations created by the community. You can play with other vizzes. One of the best things about Tableau is their user community popularly known as #Datafam on Twitter. Everyone I have encountered through #Datafam has offered a helping hand and sincerely seems to want every member of the community to improve despite their proficiency.
Tableau Public is designed for scientists, academics, or anyone who wants to create and explore the journey of data visualization. For anyone looking to share data, collaborate publicly, and learn data visualization inspired by other people’s work, Tableau Public is worth a try.
Pro: Tableau Public is that it offers unparalleled data visualization with fully functional and interactive graphics.
Con: You cannot save your workbook locally and everything you create gets shared publicly on your Tableau Public profile, which limits its usefulness for work based on proprietary data.
Example: Below is a depiction of viz I created in Tableau Public showing the number of livestock species in Karnali, Nepal.
2. Flourish Public
When it comes to storytelling, Flourish tops the list and is ideal for anyone looking to tell stories with data. It enables immersive storytelling rather than more traditional ways of visualizing as tables, diagrams, and dashboards. Unlike Tableau Public, Flourish does not require a desktop edition. It is browser-based. You can choose a wide range of flexible templates from the library. Flourish is typically for social media sharing and website content.
Flourish enables journalists to guide readers through one or more visualizations, animating between views to create a narrative. If you are a journalist and involved in newsrooms, Flourish is worth a try.
Pro: It is super easy to create interactive rotating globes and maps in Flourish.
Con: It doesn’t support adding data from Google Sheets or other online sheets in its free version.
Example: Below is an alternative depiction of my previous viz in Flourish Public regarding the number of livestock species in Karnali, Nepal.
3. Infogram
Infogram is a browser-based visualization platform that offers interactive charts, graphics, infographics, and maps to tell a story and has many free templates from which to choose. In addition to supporting local data uploads, it also supports uploads from Google Sheets, Dropbox, MySQL, and direct JSON data feeds. Infogram provides object animations that allow you to easily zoom, bounce, rotate, fade, and slide objects into your work.
Infogram is for anyone who wants to stand out with data-driven content. If you are a marketer, media company, or strategic business leader, Infogram is worth a try.
Pro: It is easy to create reports, slides, dashboards, email headers, and social media contents in addition to interactive visualizations.
Con: In the free version, when you want to insert interactive charts into your website, you get a large Infogram logo. You have to upgrade to a paid version to remove it
Example: Here is my Nepalese livestock viz in Infogram.https://cdn.embedly.com/widgets/media.html?src=https%3A%2F%2Fe.infogram.com%2F27b0fbad-253b-41f0-863b-d8bffb31d490%3Fsrc%3Dembed&display_name=Infogram&url=https%3A%2F%2Finfogram.com%2Flivestock-in-karnali-nepal-1h7z2l8mqwlzx6o&image=https%3A%2F%2Finfogram-thumbs-1024.s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com%2F18bf71b7-9fc7-40bc-9ec5-0824b3403e49.jpg&key=a19fcc184b9711e1b4764040d3dc5c07&type=text%2Fhtml&schema=infogramViz by the author. View the interactive visualization here.
5. Openheatmap. This one purports to transform your spreadsheet, presumably encumbered with some kind of geographical data, into a functioning heat map with just one click. It works with Google Spreadsheets so you’ll have to import your Microsoft Excel spreadsheet there if you want to use Openheatmap. But that’s a relatively trivial requirement considering the possible results.
6. Leaflet. This is definitely not a tool for complete newbies because it’s just a JavaScript library that you’ll need to incorporate into your data visualization framework on your own. But it’s well-known because it’s super lightweight (only 33 KB), and it’s aces for building not just maps but interactive mapping visuals aimed specifically for mobile devices. That can be a tall order even for some of the commercial BI tools we’ve reviewed. So, if you’re not scared of the command line or making an application programming interface (API) call, then check it out.
7. Datawrapper. Backed by Berlin, Germany-based company Datawrapper GmbH, Datawrapper is nevertheless multinational, having been built by a team of designers, developers, and journalists from a number of European countries as well as the United States. The tool is specifically built for journalists looking to create fast, easily digestible visualizations to accompany their articles; however, it’s useful for anyone requiring similiar data views. While there is a paid version that supports the company, there’s also a free plan that tops out at 10,000 charts, which should keep many SMB operators happy for quite some time. The tool is entirely web-based, and the website includes not only access mechanics but also an Academy area in which you can take online learning classes on how to use Datawrapper. There’s a Gallery area, too, called the River, in which users can upload data and their visualizations for sharing.https://df9383fd76fcb3c55709c32c8a698408.safeframe.googlesyndication.com/safeframe/1-0-38/html/container.html
8. Chartbuilder. This is a well-known chart-creation tool that was made publicly available by financial news website Quartz in 2013. Quartz had developed the tool in-house so its journalists could quickly render numerical data visually to make their stories stand out. Ironically, Chartbuilder isn’t very pretty itself and also is not the easiest tool for rank beginners to use. You’ll need to understand how to download the tool and activate a Python script to get it running.
But after that, it’s simply a matter of cutting and pasting data into the tool (also not pretty but very easy), and then generating a graphic that you can tweak via the tool or via style sheets. The only downside to the tool (aside from a little upfront complexity) is that it doesn’t generate interactive visualizations like most of the other tools on this list do. Chartbuilder creates only static charts, though these are very polished, as befits something intended to go from numbers to slick published content in just a few steps.
9. Information is Beautiful. This is simply a growing library of striking, prebuilt visualizations that other people have created by using a variety of tools. The gallery is fun and everything is downloadable, though you’ll need to pay attention to the licensing agreements. These agreements give free access to individuals (especially students and academics) but, if you’re looking to use these visualizations for commercial work, then you’ll need to fork over some dough. Exactly how much depends on who you are and on an email exchange with the website’s owner. Just to warn you: We had asked to pay for a visualization for this story, and two weeks after the request, we still hadn’t heard back. So, if fast turnaround is part of your agenda, then look elsewhere.
10. Prezi
While it may not strictly be a data visualization tool, we couldn’t miss Prezi off of this list. The online editor gives you the functionality and inspiration required to create unique, out-of-the-box presentations. With a little creative thinking, you can spice up your standard company presentations and start presenting with interactive slides that better complement your story.
Don’t expect too many unique or exciting chart layouts with Prezi. That’s not what Prezi is about. With a bit of thought around iconography, movement and type, you can start creating bespoke narrative experiences and take your stakeholders on a whole journey.
Bonus: Visme
Because there are so many data visualisation tools available it’s hard to narrow down all of the amazing options to just ten; so we would like to mention just one more before we close. Visme is a brilliant online tool that allows you to create a myriad of dynamic infographics, presentations, charts, maps, graphs, social media graphics, and a variety of other documents to accurately and engagingly present your data.
With its extensive library of graphics, templates, and stock images, the accessibility and scope of this platform is unique, allowing anyone to create clear, professional visuals. For insight professionals, this would definitely be worth checking out, especially if you’re looking to experiment a little with your data visualisation or report presentation techniques.
That’s the end of our list. It certainly wasn’t easy to narrow the selection down to just our favourite ten, and we know there are a lot more fantastic tools out there. What tools would you add to this list? Let us know your favourites and recommendations in the comments below.
Conclusions
Data visualization tools can be very useful for creating or updating your charts and maps in an easy and fast way. There are lots of different formats and styles for data visualization and many tools to create them. If you want to learn more about data visualization free online tools, just keep on reading the article.