8 ms·

Highcharts – JavaScript charting framework

124 points by ashwin_kumar 12y ago

jackmoore 12y ago
That's a lot of open issues…
- wcummings 12y ago
  A lot of open issues means a lot of active users.
jestar_jokin 12y ago
Unfortunately, this isn't free for commercial use, so perhaps something like Google Charts is more suitable (depending on your use case). There are plenty of alternatives out there.
- iamshs 12y ago
  Will you be kind enough to list some examples please. I am working on some of this stuff.
  - beermann 12y ago
    Chartist.js just had a lot of support on HN, although I haven't used it. I've used Raphaël but customizing it can actually be a bit hard. Chart.js is simple, easy to use, and just powerful enough for most cases.
  - jestar_jokin 12y ago
    Someone already wrote the list for me! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_JavaScript_charting_frameworks http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_JavaScript_charti...
  - lalwanivikas 12y ago
    http://www.fusioncharts.com/javascript-charting-comparison/ http://www.fusioncharts.com/javascript-charting-comparison/
- Bahamut 12y ago
  d3 is probably the one that has gained the most buzz from developers as of late. From my experimentation/evaluation of various charting libraries, d3 is certainly the most powerful.
  - minimaxir 12y ago
    For charting, d3 has an insanely high learning curve. (spent last weekend looking for one and while there are a few good d3-based charting libraries, they aren't very robust)
    - gumballhead 12y ago
      It is a worthy learning curve though
  - nilkn 12y ago
    d3 is not really a charting library. It's a general data binding engine that happens to have exceptional SVG support. Entire classes are taught on d3 due to its generality.
  - floatrock 12y ago
    The difference between d3 and highcharts is like a paint brush vs. a coloring book. If you're davinci, you can make masterpieces with a paint brush. However, even davinci (probably) started off drawing little stick figures. A coloring book defines the basic shapes you want, you just need to fill in the colors and add your personal touch. Highcharts is neat because it's a high-level api around charting. If you want to make charts, it's one of the most customizable and well-documented API's out there. If you want to build a custom visualization, highcharts offers a good amount of customizability, but sometimes you just gotta drop down into assembly.
- louhike 12y ago
  Google Charts is nice but its major problem is that the data has to be sent to Google so it renders your chart if I get it well. But yes, there are plenty of alternatives. Some are not updated anymore but can still be useful according to your use cases.
beermann 12y ago
I like Highcharts a lot and we are paying for and using it, but be careful with the licensing. Chances are you'll need to pay $390 for it unless you're using it on a single domain, in which case it's $90. And that's for a single developer. 5 developers and multiple domains = $1500 without support, and there's nothing in between. And if you don't get the license and support you don't get hotfixes and updates, which seems odd. There are a lot of other charting libraries out there. Look at the licensing before you commit to any of them.
- program 12y ago
  According to the site the 90$ price apply when: "For use on a simple webpage that is not considered a web application. A web application is a website that has customer specific data or charges for its use. This requires a Developer license." http://shop.highsoft.com/highcharts/highcharts-single-website-license.html http://shop.highsoft.com/highcharts/highcharts-single-websit...
minimaxir 12y ago
Note that v4.0.4 was released today, which I assume is the reason for the submission.
sideproject 12y ago
Highchart has been so good for our work we HAD to pay for it. We've looked at almost every single charting library (mostly open source) but in the end, the power & flexibility of Highcharts coud not be beaten. Another awesome thing is their support. Ask a question on their forum or SO, then you'll most likely get an answer with a working JSFiddle example either from the community or the developers of Highcharts. This is #1 on our JS library list.
- jkulmala 12y ago
  +1 to this. I use Highcharts in my product and have saved much more work than their licensing fee cost me.
wcummings 12y ago
Old news is old, but highcharts is GREAT! Worth paying for.
mamcx 12y ago
A bit Offtopic: Somebody have used http://js.devexpress.com/WebDevelopment/ http://js.devexpress.com/WebDevelopment/? I between it and highcharts for a dashboard-type app for Desktop + IOS browser. I have used DevExpress before and is a good company but never the JS products. Is less expensive and bundle a JS grid, that I need too.
simonw 12y ago
Every page on that site returns a 200 status code, and the same content as the homepage. This means that http://www.highcharts.com/license http://www.highcharts.com/license (linked to from GitHub) is currently failing silently - you get content, but it's not the licensing information. Note that http://www.highcharts.com/licenseoneutahenuo http://www.highcharts.com/licenseoneutahenuo returns the exact same content again. 404s are useful! Don't disable them.
- josephwegner 12y ago
  I've been seeing this as a default behavior for some static site hosts. If you don't supply them with an error.html, they redirect 404s back to the homepage by default - but with a 302, not a 404 + meta redirect. I'd much prefer a generic error page supplied by the host, even if it doesn't match the brand of the rest of my site - 404s are a pretty important piece of the internet.
- Koldark 12y ago
  You mean like: http://mikewills.me/sucka/ http://mikewills.me/sucka/ ? Jekyll and S3.
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
- TorsteinHonsi 12y ago
  We've fixed that now, thanks for noticing!
Ecio78 12y ago
We used it in my previous companies and our developers were very happy about it. Previously we were using http://www.amcharts.com/ http://www.amcharts.com/ good product (but we switched because at that time amcharts was flash only - I think), but my dev colleagues told me that Highcharts was more powerful. P.S. at that time (4-5 years ago) it was possible to use Amcharts for free in commercial app but with reduced features (for example you couldn't handle a click on the graph because in the free edition it would open their site) and showing a link in the bottom of the chart. It seems it follows the same rule now according to their download page, so consider it if you want a good free charting library (I used also amMap and it was ok)
- mdmullinax 12y ago
  I implemented amCharts earlier this year on an internal project. The version we used is not rendered in flash. They use SVG (and VML for IE6-8 support). Been very pleased with their look/feel and feature set. The documentation on their site was organized and helpful. Concluded on amCharts as a result of a personal analysis of eight charting libraries. amCharts does allow free (with conditions, link) and pay options. I think highcharts is a top contender but ultimately felt amCharts had better aesthetics. The updated highcharts is certainly looking good. (here was the analysis breakdown done in February 2014: http://i.stack.imgur.com/efgoR.png http://i.stack.imgur.com/efgoR.png)
akurilin 12y ago
Thoughts on Highcharts vs Google Charts?
- andreiv 12y ago
  For me, the fact that I couldn't use Google Charts offline was the end of the road of "testing" GC. I needed to make an intranet web app that would not be "allowed to communicate with the exterior".
- samdb 12y ago
  Google Charts is hosted, like https://app.chartblocks.com https://app.chartblocks.com - you can download or save the charts that get produced but it's not a charting library that can be used offline. If you want hosted charts you've also got to give someone access to your data.
- damoncali 12y ago
  In my experience, Google Charts (along with everything else out there) will have you begging to pay for Highcharts as soon as you run into something slightly non-standard, which happens quickly.
ejain 12y ago
I'm using Highcharts for all the charts on https://zenobase.com/ https://zenobase.com/. There are a lot of open source alternatives, but none I've seen so far handle axes labels as well as Highcharts does out of the box (i.e. ensure that there isn't a mess of overlapping labels).
pablobaz 12y ago
Here's my plugin to integrate Hichcharts with AngularJS: https://github.com/pablojim/highcharts-ng/ https://github.com/pablojim/highcharts-ng/
areski 12y ago
NVd3 (http://nvd3.org/ http://nvd3.org/) is the good opensource alternative without the problem of highcharts licensing https://shop.highsoft.com/highcharts.html https://shop.highsoft.com/highcharts.html
- j_jochem 12y ago
  The fluent API looks a lot nicer than highcharts' API. This is definitely going on my shortlist of the next project that needs charts.
chaostheory 12y ago
It's too expensive and there are plenty of free alternatives like http://c3js.org/ http://c3js.org/ http://www.chartjs.org/ http://www.chartjs.org/ http://nvd3.org/ http://nvd3.org/ and plenty more
- simulate 12y ago
  Adding to the list, Contour is a recent open source library that is easy to use and extensible: http://forio.com/contour/ http://forio.com/contour/ it also has good documentation: http://forio.com/contour/documentation.html http://forio.com/contour/documentation.html
- voidr 12y ago
  If you are building a commercial product and 590$ is too expensive, I feel sorry for you. In western countries you could get at most 2-3 man days for that money, I highly doubt that even the best coder could implement Highcharts in 3 days and provide support for it afterwards. If all you want is one or two simple charts then I agree, it is a waste of money to buy something like Highcharts, but if you really need most of what it has to offer then it is a good investment. I have integrated Highcharts into a commercial project and it was a success.
  - rtfeldman 12y ago
    The pricing policy is more obnoxious than the price itself. $390 (or $590 for "maintenance and support") gets you the ability for one single developer to do any kind of work with it. The next tier is $1,500 (or $2,250 for "maintenance and support") and gets you the ability for up to 5 developers to do any kind of work with it. Having to pick between (A) sneaking around behind your vendor's back to violate their licensing terms by having more developers work on it than you paid for and (trivially) concealing that from them, (B) paying $1,500 instead of $590 (!) just so more people can legally work on it, and not even getting support, or (C) micromanaging your team such that literally only one human being can actually work on that part of the code base... ...makes for a real bad customer experience, which is surely to the detriment of sales.
naugtur 12y ago
How is this news?
- collyw 12y ago
  Its JavaScript. Automatically makes it news here. (Awaits the down votes, doesn't expect any explanation of why it is news).
- sleepyhead 12y ago
  It's not new but I didn't know it was on Github. Perhaps that is the news?
- hnha 12y ago
  Hi and welcome to HN. HN is not just about news but also generally things that its community considers worth reading/looking at. If you are only interested in news, I would suggest you either find yourself a suitable news website or execute the mental strength to skip over content you are not interested in. Have a nice day!
jasonwen 12y ago
Have been using highcharts now for a few years. It's easy too start with, with preset examples (but who wants default colors anyway haha). I had to write an extra layer though to render charts more easily, directly from the dom. Took quite some work but I don't want anything else now. Just set some data attributes and I can create pie's, line charts, and bars all on the fly! It almost never failed me to customize it, editability is good and API doc extensive.
calewis 12y ago
If you are working on a commercial product that you have to support its very good value for money. Saved us all time and effort and allowed us to focus on building other stuff, without worrying about IE8 support. This is something which the other free alternatives, generally, don't do very well.
barrystaes 12y ago
I am a developer and i approve of this message. This is hands down the best graph money can buy.. in a half-day test our webapplication suddenly was top-knotch, we immediately payed them a licence.. it saved us over a week of workhours and it wouldn't even be near half that good! The configuration via the JS array is simple but extremely versatile, and the (interactive) zoomable time-series graphs are my favorite. Another great thing is that it supports image exports by our local (not always internet connected) webapplication server.
boomskats 12y ago
We paid a lot of cash for Highcharts (Highstock actually) a couple of years ago as an up-front investment for a process manager we were building - an OEM licence. This was about a month's salary, straight after I quit my FT job. The product is now ready to go live almost three years later, and there still isn't a charting library, free or otherwise, that offers us the same functionality that this did back when we licenced it. Not to mention the fact that the CTO himself will fix bugs for you within a week or so if you ask him nicely. Great company and great model. I don't get how people can complain about the fact it costs money. The costs are passed on to your client who will gladly pay for a better product, and you're supporting the ecosystem. I'd have paid double what we paid.
- deeviant 12y ago
  I don't think the problem is that highcharts costs money, but that there are no good FOSS alternatives(I embarked on a fairly extensive search last week for a FOSS js charting libraries and although I did end up choose one of those for the project, it was not nearly as fleshed out as Highcharts). One thing that tends to happen when you have a very strong commercial library out there, is it often discourages the creation of a FOSS alternative, which is somewhat unfortunate. FOSS is one of the great enablers of modern software engineering and FOSS is far from "gimme software for free and I give you nothing, thanks!" type situation that some people make it out to be.
  - sanderjd 12y ago
    It seems like a big contributor to this problem is that the culture of FOSS is largely hostile to paying for software, even if its source is open and modifiable (but probably not re-distributable). I don't much about this, but I would love to make open source libraries or application that I can sell licenses for, but I'm not very optimistic it would work, and I'm not completely sure why it shouldn't.
    - ris 12y ago
      I don't think it's specifically paying for things, it's just developers don't like arbitrary restrictions put on something they rely on. And however you look at it, pricing and pricing structures are essentially arbitrary.
corbinpage 12y ago
I have absolutely loved using Highcharts on past projects. Just avoid the headaches and use Highcharts.
cturhan 12y ago
The old youtube analytics page was using Highcharts I suppose and it was styled well. Currently they switched Google Charts to visualize data. I'm not sure because all the js code is obfuscated but when I look some values are not obfuscated the functions remind me the variables in these libraries. Edit: Yes, currently it is definitely Google charts now but I think it was Highcharts in the past.
sigurdurf 12y ago
4 years ago I had to make a small webapp that displayed sensor data with up to 20000 points. At the time this was the only graph library I found that could handle so many points in a reasonable time, the library has some nice options for quickly summarizing large dataset to a smaller subset for visualizing. Possibly there are better alternatives today for such datasets, I haven´t looked into it recently.
nothans 12y ago
HighCharts + Internet of Things: https://thingspeak.com/channels/3 https://thingspeak.com/channels/3
andreash 12y ago
A fascinating thing about Highcharts is that they are located in a supertiny, remote town in Norway called Vik. Only 2900 live there. Highcharts employ 10 people + a few remote workers. You can read about this tiny remote place on the founder's personal webpage here: https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=no&sl=no&tl=en&u=http%3A%2F%2Fvikjavev.no%2Fomvik%2F https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=no&sl=no&tl=en&u=h...
webmaven 12y ago
https://github.com/highslide-software/highcharts.com/issues/3405 https://github.com/highslide-software/highcharts.com/issues/...

124 points by ashwin_kumar 12y ago

jackmoore 12y ago

That's a lot of open issues…

wcummings 12y ago
A lot of open issues means a lot of active users.

jestar_jokin 12y ago

Unfortunately, this isn't free for commercial use, so perhaps something like Google Charts is more suitable (depending on your use case). There are plenty of alternatives out there.

iamshs 12y ago
Will you be kind enough to list some examples please. I am working on some of this stuff.
- beermann 12y ago
  Chartist.js just had a lot of support on HN, although I haven't used it. I've used Raphaël but customizing it can actually be a bit hard. Chart.js is simple, easy to use, and just powerful enough for most cases.
- jestar_jokin 12y ago
  Someone already wrote the list for me! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_JavaScript_charting_frameworks http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_JavaScript_charti...
- lalwanivikas 12y ago
  http://www.fusioncharts.com/javascript-charting-comparison/ http://www.fusioncharts.com/javascript-charting-comparison/
Bahamut 12y ago
d3 is probably the one that has gained the most buzz from developers as of late. From my experimentation/evaluation of various charting libraries, d3 is certainly the most powerful.
- minimaxir 12y ago
  For charting, d3 has an insanely high learning curve. (spent last weekend looking for one and while there are a few good d3-based charting libraries, they aren't very robust)
  - gumballhead 12y ago
    It is a worthy learning curve though
- nilkn 12y ago
  d3 is not really a charting library. It's a general data binding engine that happens to have exceptional SVG support. Entire classes are taught on d3 due to its generality.
- floatrock 12y ago
  The difference between d3 and highcharts is like a paint brush vs. a coloring book. If you're davinci, you can make masterpieces with a paint brush. However, even davinci (probably) started off drawing little stick figures. A coloring book defines the basic shapes you want, you just need to fill in the colors and add your personal touch. Highcharts is neat because it's a high-level api around charting. If you want to make charts, it's one of the most customizable and well-documented API's out there. If you want to build a custom visualization, highcharts offers a good amount of customizability, but sometimes you just gotta drop down into assembly.
louhike 12y ago
Google Charts is nice but its major problem is that the data has to be sent to Google so it renders your chart if I get it well. But yes, there are plenty of alternatives. Some are not updated anymore but can still be useful according to your use cases.

beermann 12y ago

I like Highcharts a lot and we are paying for and using it, but be careful with the licensing. Chances are you'll need to pay $390 for it unless you're using it on a single domain, in which case it's $90. And that's for a single developer. 5 developers and multiple domains = $1500 without support, and there's nothing in between. And if you don't get the license and support you don't get hotfixes and updates, which seems odd. There are a lot of other charting libraries out there. Look at the licensing before you commit to any of them.

program 12y ago
According to the site the 90$ price apply when: "For use on a simple webpage that is not considered a web application. A web application is a website that has customer specific data or charges for its use. This requires a Developer license." http://shop.highsoft.com/highcharts/highcharts-single-website-license.html http://shop.highsoft.com/highcharts/highcharts-single-websit...

minimaxir 12y ago

Note that v4.0.4 was released today, which I assume is the reason for the submission.

sideproject 12y ago

Highchart has been so good for our work we HAD to pay for it. We've looked at almost every single charting library (mostly open source) but in the end, the power & flexibility of Highcharts coud not be beaten. Another awesome thing is their support. Ask a question on their forum or SO, then you'll most likely get an answer with a working JSFiddle example either from the community or the developers of Highcharts. This is #1 on our JS library list.

jkulmala 12y ago
+1 to this. I use Highcharts in my product and have saved much more work than their licensing fee cost me.

wcummings 12y ago

Old news is old, but highcharts is GREAT! Worth paying for.

mamcx 12y ago

A bit Offtopic: Somebody have used http://js.devexpress.com/WebDevelopment/ http://js.devexpress.com/WebDevelopment/? I between it and highcharts for a dashboard-type app for Desktop + IOS browser. I have used DevExpress before and is a good company but never the JS products. Is less expensive and bundle a JS grid, that I need too.

simonw 12y ago

Every page on that site returns a 200 status code, and the same content as the homepage. This means that http://www.highcharts.com/license http://www.highcharts.com/license (linked to from GitHub) is currently failing silently - you get content, but it's not the licensing information. Note that http://www.highcharts.com/licenseoneutahenuo http://www.highcharts.com/licenseoneutahenuo returns the exact same content again. 404s are useful! Don't disable them.

josephwegner 12y ago
I've been seeing this as a default behavior for some static site hosts. If you don't supply them with an error.html, they redirect 404s back to the homepage by default - but with a 302, not a 404 + meta redirect. I'd much prefer a generic error page supplied by the host, even if it doesn't match the brand of the rest of my site - 404s are a pretty important piece of the internet.
Koldark 12y ago
You mean like: http://mikewills.me/sucka/ http://mikewills.me/sucka/ ? Jekyll and S3.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
TorsteinHonsi 12y ago
We've fixed that now, thanks for noticing!

Ecio78 12y ago

We used it in my previous companies and our developers were very happy about it. Previously we were using http://www.amcharts.com/ http://www.amcharts.com/ good product (but we switched because at that time amcharts was flash only - I think), but my dev colleagues told me that Highcharts was more powerful. P.S. at that time (4-5 years ago) it was possible to use Amcharts for free in commercial app but with reduced features (for example you couldn't handle a click on the graph because in the free edition it would open their site) and showing a link in the bottom of the chart. It seems it follows the same rule now according to their download page, so consider it if you want a good free charting library (I used also amMap and it was ok)

mdmullinax 12y ago
I implemented amCharts earlier this year on an internal project. The version we used is not rendered in flash. They use SVG (and VML for IE6-8 support). Been very pleased with their look/feel and feature set. The documentation on their site was organized and helpful. Concluded on amCharts as a result of a personal analysis of eight charting libraries. amCharts does allow free (with conditions, link) and pay options. I think highcharts is a top contender but ultimately felt amCharts had better aesthetics. The updated highcharts is certainly looking good. (here was the analysis breakdown done in February 2014: http://i.stack.imgur.com/efgoR.png http://i.stack.imgur.com/efgoR.png)

akurilin 12y ago

Thoughts on Highcharts vs Google Charts?

andreiv 12y ago
For me, the fact that I couldn't use Google Charts offline was the end of the road of "testing" GC. I needed to make an intranet web app that would not be "allowed to communicate with the exterior".
samdb 12y ago
Google Charts is hosted, like https://app.chartblocks.com https://app.chartblocks.com - you can download or save the charts that get produced but it's not a charting library that can be used offline. If you want hosted charts you've also got to give someone access to your data.
damoncali 12y ago
In my experience, Google Charts (along with everything else out there) will have you begging to pay for Highcharts as soon as you run into something slightly non-standard, which happens quickly.

ejain 12y ago

I'm using Highcharts for all the charts on https://zenobase.com/ https://zenobase.com/. There are a lot of open source alternatives, but none I've seen so far handle axes labels as well as Highcharts does out of the box (i.e. ensure that there isn't a mess of overlapping labels).

pablobaz 12y ago

Here's my plugin to integrate Hichcharts with AngularJS: https://github.com/pablojim/highcharts-ng/ https://github.com/pablojim/highcharts-ng/

areski 12y ago

NVd3 (http://nvd3.org/ http://nvd3.org/) is the good opensource alternative without the problem of highcharts licensing https://shop.highsoft.com/highcharts.html https://shop.highsoft.com/highcharts.html

j_jochem 12y ago
The fluent API looks a lot nicer than highcharts' API. This is definitely going on my shortlist of the next project that needs charts.

chaostheory 12y ago

It's too expensive and there are plenty of free alternatives like http://c3js.org/ http://c3js.org/ http://www.chartjs.org/ http://www.chartjs.org/ http://nvd3.org/ http://nvd3.org/ and plenty more

simulate 12y ago
Adding to the list, Contour is a recent open source library that is easy to use and extensible: http://forio.com/contour/ http://forio.com/contour/ it also has good documentation: http://forio.com/contour/documentation.html http://forio.com/contour/documentation.html
voidr 12y ago
If you are building a commercial product and 590$ is too expensive, I feel sorry for you. In western countries you could get at most 2-3 man days for that money, I highly doubt that even the best coder could implement Highcharts in 3 days and provide support for it afterwards. If all you want is one or two simple charts then I agree, it is a waste of money to buy something like Highcharts, but if you really need most of what it has to offer then it is a good investment. I have integrated Highcharts into a commercial project and it was a success.
- rtfeldman 12y ago
  The pricing policy is more obnoxious than the price itself. $390 (or $590 for "maintenance and support") gets you the ability for one single developer to do any kind of work with it. The next tier is $1,500 (or $2,250 for "maintenance and support") and gets you the ability for up to 5 developers to do any kind of work with it. Having to pick between (A) sneaking around behind your vendor's back to violate their licensing terms by having more developers work on it than you paid for and (trivially) concealing that from them, (B) paying $1,500 instead of $590 (!) just so more people can legally work on it, and not even getting support, or (C) micromanaging your team such that literally only one human being can actually work on that part of the code base... ...makes for a real bad customer experience, which is surely to the detriment of sales.

naugtur 12y ago

How is this news?

collyw 12y ago
Its JavaScript. Automatically makes it news here. (Awaits the down votes, doesn't expect any explanation of why it is news).
sleepyhead 12y ago
It's not new but I didn't know it was on Github. Perhaps that is the news?
hnha 12y ago
Hi and welcome to HN. HN is not just about news but also generally things that its community considers worth reading/looking at. If you are only interested in news, I would suggest you either find yourself a suitable news website or execute the mental strength to skip over content you are not interested in. Have a nice day!

jasonwen 12y ago

Have been using highcharts now for a few years. It's easy too start with, with preset examples (but who wants default colors anyway haha). I had to write an extra layer though to render charts more easily, directly from the dom. Took quite some work but I don't want anything else now. Just set some data attributes and I can create pie's, line charts, and bars all on the fly! It almost never failed me to customize it, editability is good and API doc extensive.

calewis 12y ago

If you are working on a commercial product that you have to support its very good value for money. Saved us all time and effort and allowed us to focus on building other stuff, without worrying about IE8 support. This is something which the other free alternatives, generally, don't do very well.

barrystaes 12y ago

I am a developer and i approve of this message. This is hands down the best graph money can buy.. in a half-day test our webapplication suddenly was top-knotch, we immediately payed them a licence.. it saved us over a week of workhours and it wouldn't even be near half that good! The configuration via the JS array is simple but extremely versatile, and the (interactive) zoomable time-series graphs are my favorite. Another great thing is that it supports image exports by our local (not always internet connected) webapplication server.

boomskats 12y ago

We paid a lot of cash for Highcharts (Highstock actually) a couple of years ago as an up-front investment for a process manager we were building - an OEM licence. This was about a month's salary, straight after I quit my FT job. The product is now ready to go live almost three years later, and there still isn't a charting library, free or otherwise, that offers us the same functionality that this did back when we licenced it. Not to mention the fact that the CTO himself will fix bugs for you within a week or so if you ask him nicely. Great company and great model. I don't get how people can complain about the fact it costs money. The costs are passed on to your client who will gladly pay for a better product, and you're supporting the ecosystem. I'd have paid double what we paid.

deeviant 12y ago
I don't think the problem is that highcharts costs money, but that there are no good FOSS alternatives(I embarked on a fairly extensive search last week for a FOSS js charting libraries and although I did end up choose one of those for the project, it was not nearly as fleshed out as Highcharts). One thing that tends to happen when you have a very strong commercial library out there, is it often discourages the creation of a FOSS alternative, which is somewhat unfortunate. FOSS is one of the great enablers of modern software engineering and FOSS is far from "gimme software for free and I give you nothing, thanks!" type situation that some people make it out to be.
- sanderjd 12y ago
  It seems like a big contributor to this problem is that the culture of FOSS is largely hostile to paying for software, even if its source is open and modifiable (but probably not re-distributable). I don't much about this, but I would love to make open source libraries or application that I can sell licenses for, but I'm not very optimistic it would work, and I'm not completely sure why it shouldn't.
  - ris 12y ago
    I don't think it's specifically paying for things, it's just developers don't like arbitrary restrictions put on something they rely on. And however you look at it, pricing and pricing structures are essentially arbitrary.

corbinpage 12y ago

I have absolutely loved using Highcharts on past projects. Just avoid the headaches and use Highcharts.

cturhan 12y ago

The old youtube analytics page was using Highcharts I suppose and it was styled well. Currently they switched Google Charts to visualize data. I'm not sure because all the js code is obfuscated but when I look some values are not obfuscated the functions remind me the variables in these libraries. Edit: Yes, currently it is definitely Google charts now but I think it was Highcharts in the past.

sigurdurf 12y ago

4 years ago I had to make a small webapp that displayed sensor data with up to 20000 points. At the time this was the only graph library I found that could handle so many points in a reasonable time, the library has some nice options for quickly summarizing large dataset to a smaller subset for visualizing. Possibly there are better alternatives today for such datasets, I haven´t looked into it recently.

nothans 12y ago

HighCharts + Internet of Things: https://thingspeak.com/channels/3 https://thingspeak.com/channels/3

andreash 12y ago

A fascinating thing about Highcharts is that they are located in a supertiny, remote town in Norway called Vik. Only 2900 live there. Highcharts employ 10 people + a few remote workers. You can read about this tiny remote place on the founder's personal webpage here: https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=no&sl=no&tl=en&u=http%3A%2F%2Fvikjavev.no%2Fomvik%2F https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=no&sl=no&tl=en&u=h...

webmaven 12y ago

https://github.com/highslide-software/highcharts.com/issues/3405 https://github.com/highslide-software/highcharts.com/issues/...