The Ultimate List of 21 Free and Open Source Data Visualisation Tools

Visualisation can be effective when communicating complex research. Data visualisations – which may take the form of charts or graphs, diagrams, images, animations and infographics – can be a powerful way of synthesising your research, and representing it in a way that’s understandable even to a non-expert audience. Searching for data visualisation tools, however, is a daunting, time-consuming and costly task that requires research and usually an enterprise-level budget.

In this Solutions Review article, Timothy King provides an overview of 21 open source and/or commercially free data visualisation tools as a solution to this issue. From basic and common software like Google Charts and Google Data Studio to more complex platforms such as Polymaps (for map making) and dygraphs (for large data sets with statistical components), these tools are summarised and categorised to give readers a glimpse into the possibility of data visualisation tools.

The complete list of tools reviewed is:

            Candela           Chart Studio         Charted

  Chartist       ColorBrewer             D3.js

  Datawrapper      dygraphs              Flot

Google Charts    Google Data Studio    Highcharts

    Leaflet          myHeatmap    OpenHeatMap

       Palladio          Polymaps      RAW Graphs

Tableau Public  TimelineJS     WebDataRocks

Read the full review or explore more about data visualisation through one of our 23 Research Things blog posts. Don’t forget to subscribe to Researcher@Library blog to never miss tips and tricks to assist you in your research careers.