Datawrapper: Create charts, maps, and tables | Hacker News Reader

Datawrapper: Create charts, maps, and tables

datawrapper.de

330 pointsGarbage45 comments

One of the best SaaS websites I've seen. Lets you play with the tool as much as you want without signing up and the business model is totally aimed at businesses with a very generous free tier. Chart tools seem very powerful as well.

It's a really great experience to get started. By the way, the 404 page is great as well ;) https://www.datawrapper.de/nonexistant

Damn that's the best 404 I ever seen

Pretty steep from free to $5990 per year. That's a lot of money for startups etc, but they can stick to the free tier. I'd be worried if the free tier suddenly changed though, but I doubt they'd do that to their potential customers. All in all I'd be willing to try this out.

That’s $50/seat/month if you have 10 seats and marginal seats are $21/month. Feels fine if lots of people will use it. Perhaps they are trying to avoid doing support for tiny customers.

Less than one FTE per month?

Awesome to see this here! I’m one of the co-founders, open for any questions.

We’re also always looking for developers to join our team (Berlin-based, remote welcome, 4d week possible) - email me david@datawrapper for details.

@david this looks great. On the mapping viz features, I quickly glanced and saw squares for thematic and choropleth designs. Hexagons are well-suited for this and can convey a denser amount of information: https://www.esri.com/about/newsroom/insider/thematic-mapping...

Have you had many requests for the ability to add data to a narrative from datasets? We built this for seekwell (https://doc.seekwell.io/stories) and people really like it for daily or weekly text based business updates.

I'd think this would be useful in media for a story they want to keep the numbers live in.

Definitely - all Datawrapper visualisations can also be used with live data sources (https://academy.datawrapper.de/article/317-live-updates-over...). It used to be a bit of a fringe feature for things like elections or sports events, but since Covid reporting started it became a very dominant use case.

The ‚narrative‘ concept looks super interesting!

Is there an API to get charts to/from a site without having to go through the Datawrapper site to generate? Especially on Google Sheets-linked charts. Would be nice to one-click generate new charts through an embedded API on our site.

Yes, there’s a REST API that lets you do that, documented here: https://developer.datawrapper.de/

Available on the free plan as well!

Hi, do you allow startups to embed this into their product to offer to their customers as a chart builder solution without requiring them to create their own account?like an oem approach?

Hey! At the moment, we solely focus on providing the best experience for our direct users, but we have received requests like this in the past, so it might be something to consider in the future. Happy to chat about details (email in my profile) if you want to.

Very neat product! I especially like your Maps app (I myself built TravelMap.net).

Are all your maps static?

Do you generate and host your OSM vector tiles yourself?

What do you mean by static?

Yes, the tiles for our locator maps [0] are self-generated and hosted based on OSM source data and the OpenMapTiles project.

The boundaries used for choropleths [1] are maintained by us based on various public sources (NaturalEarthData, OSM, government data, …)

[0] https://www.datawrapper.de/maps/locator-map [1] https://www.datawrapper.de/maps/choropleth-map

Can you zoom in and drag your locator maps around once embedded? I only see images being generated

The maps are rendered live (not as images), which is needed for responsiveness, but they are not draggable/zoomable. This is a product decision based on the explanatory/storytelling nature of the feature, we go into more detail here: https://academy.datawrapper.de/article/216-why-its-not-possi...

Congrats on building such a great product!

Do you support waterfall charts?

Thank you! It’s not a core chart type at the moment, but you can hack it using stacked column charts: https://academy.datawrapper.de/article/333-how-to-create-a-w...

Might become one at some point!

I know d3 and ggplot2, but Datawrapper is my goto when I want Excel-like convenience for bespoke, detailed viz. It’s completely free for individual use, and I’m happy to see that the charts and maps I made while teaching students about interactive data viz work just as well as they did the 5+ years ago.

The variety of built-in shapefiles (international, US counties) — with the ability to upload your own custom shapefiles to quickly create interactive maps — is a killer feature on its own

I work for a company that's related to politics and we use DW and the maps are so good for us. It's also great for non-tech savvy people; everybody at the company can use it, which frees up tech staff's time for other stuff.

I discovered datawrapper 2 months ago while looking at internet speeds vs age due to an unconvincing reddit debate [1] : I really liked it. Data presentation on the internet always frustrates me, because it usually is just a picture, or worse, a video. No interaction, no mouseover to check details.

Datawrapper covered all of that, I really like that.

[1] If you are interested: The argument was that older populations are the main factor of slow internet. No data was provided during the discussion. As I found that unconvincing I investigated based on easily accessible but skewed data. The result:

OECD countries only (english): https://datawrapper.dwcdn.net/YTBQ2/1/

World (german, as it was the german subreddit): https://datawrapper.dwcdn.net/Ps2UG/1/

Wow, talk about stumbling over the mother of all confounded relationships!

Definitly. For me it was enough to see no obvious negative correlation(as was claimed) even though the data is not great and no analysis for other variables was done.

The best result of that discussion was finding the tool and presentation.

Sorry, I don't follow. How is it enough to see no obvious negative correlation?

This diagram says literally nothing since many of the important causal pathways involved are not sufficiently controlled for. Before and after seeing this diagram, you ought to have effectively no change in your belief.

Original claim was: Internet speeds are low in Germany (and other countries) because of the high age of the people living there. Countries with a younger population place higher importance on the internet and therefore have higher internet speeds.

The various data sources on "internet speeds" are not good, age is better docummented and probably less questionable (I never worked with humans to really establish any of that). I was under the impression that good data on internet speeds is hard to get, so I went for worse data to get a first impression.

If the skew is not created by bad data (e.g., variable selection bias in different populations) but by other causal relationships, I believe it discredits the factor of population age as the main contributor.

I was and am willing to discuss those weaknesses of the data in a discussion. I think I stated with those graphs that I stayed unconvinced of the claim, not that they are conclusive proof. I think of them as a form of exploration to see if a claim is worth further investigation (especially considering the amount of work needed for that).

It's those pirates suppressing global warming once again ;-)

Can someone summarize how this compares to Plotly and ChartStudio? Also flexible and easy for non-programmers to master. And open sourse.

Finally checked this out - really, REALLY great site. I put it aside for so long because I rarely have use for these things over Excel, ggplot, or GSheets, but this is a great product with a solid niche. We'll definitely be using the free version and eyeing the premium tier later this year.

Hats off to you.

A relatively simple tech that everyone can build for a very generic use; yet, once you actually see it, you realize none of the chart making tools you have worked with are as straightforward. I wish I could think simple like this.

This is what they used for The Spectator's (UK Political Magazine) excellent Covid Dashboards, where i first heard of it

https://data.spectator.co.uk/

Very appealing. Heavy price tag though for small and medium projects that are not focused solely on charting. Can someone recommend a product or service somewhere in between Datawrapper and D3 convenience wise?

Edit: I realize there’s a very generous free plan, but for real client projects white label is unfortunately often a must.

(Disclaimer: I work at Datawrapper)

For most projects, our free plan might suffice: https://blog.datawrapper.de/create-data-visualization-for-fr...

It’s fully usable for commercial use as well.

In terms of in-between projects, if comfortable with a bit of programming I would probably look at Vega Lite [0] or Observable Plot [1]. For GUI tools, there’s also the excellent RAW Graphs [2] to consider!

[0] https://vega.github.io/vega-lite/ [1] https://observablehq.com/@observablehq/plot [2] https://rawgraphs.io/

I've tried it with a relatively simple CSV but it's struggling to parse dates, generating meaningful reports, etc. The UX for choosing which columns to include is cumbersome when you have more than a handful. I've cut down the CSV from 50MB+ to 6MB and it's still so slow.

Being able to try it without signup is such an underrated feature. Thank you for that!

I really like the "Connect to Google Sheet" option. Did you have to implement a Google Workspace plugin for that functionality?

No, it’s purely based on the Google Sheets/Drive API. Doesn’t require you to install a plugin, just share your sheet with data@datawrapper.de or set it to public and you’re good to go.

Is this just a form builder for D3?

Custom plan: $599/mo. Really ? Eject!

There are thousands of open source apps that do this things free and better (D3, Datavis etc.). Just needed a little effort.

This isn't for you, it's for enterprises that don't want to spend human resources setting this up manually and supporting it.

Exactly. Had 0 intention working today, came across this, played with it. Will literally collapse days of work into minutes for our use case, once we connect to the API and integrate it into our workflow

Awesome! Sounds super interesting, would be curious to learn more about your workflow (and maybe we can help somehow). Email in my profile if you’re interested!

This complaint is a bit strange given that they have an entire free tier for you to use and that their custom package includes them doing actual design work for you, not just more and better hosting options.

Every service can be replicated by just doing it yourself - the proposition here is that it might be - or might not, depending on your needs - more cost-effective than hiring a designer yourself do apply your branding to your data visualizations.

And rsync is a replacement for GDrive, Dropbox, etc. But hmm...

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