Ask HN: What data visualization tools do you use?

#1

Post by navait » Fri, Mar 05, 2021, 2:49 PM UTC

My Tableau license at work expired, and I had been expirimenting with creating dashboards for my personal data in it. Since my company will not be renewing it, I need to use something else.

What tools do you like? I'm a programmer, so things like D3 and matplotlib are great too.

Re: Ask HN: What data visualization tools do you use?

#2

Post by NoOneNew » Fri, Mar 05, 2021, 3:21 PM UTC

Pretty sure I'll get shit for this one. I like Microsoft BI. It's easy and quick to slap charts together, filter, organize, etc. It can import a crazy amount of file formats and DBs. The stand alone is free and exports pdfs you can decently design. I mostly use it privately for investigating data. So my report generation knowledge isnt deep. If you want to use the cloud services, that costs a bit. They update just about every month with some new features. I find quarterly is when you see significant changes.

Re: Ask HN: What data visualization tools do you use?

#3

Post by navait » Fri, Mar 05, 2021, 3:26 PM UTC

NoOneNew wrote: post #2

Pretty sure I'll get shit for this one. I like Microsoft BI. It's easy and quick to slap charts together, filter, organize, etc. It can import a crazy amount of file formats and DBs. The stand alone is free and exports pdfs you can decently design. I mostly use it privately for investigating data. So my report generation knowledge isnt deep. If you want to use the cloud services, that costs a bit. They update just ab…

No, it's great. I assumed Power BI cost a lot of money and wouldn't have considered it.

Re: Ask HN: What data visualization tools do you use?

#4

Post by NoOneNew » Fri, Mar 05, 2021, 3:31 PM UTC

navait wrote: post #3

NoOneNew wrote: post #2

Pretty sure I'll get shit for this one. I like Microsoft BI. It's easy and quick to slap charts together, filter, organize, etc. It can import a crazy amount of file formats and DBs. The stand alone is free and exports pdfs you can decently design. I mostly use it privately for investigating data. So my report generation knowledge isnt deep. If you want to use the cloud services, that costs a bit. They update just ab…

No, it's great. I assumed Power BI cost a lot of money and wouldn't have considered it.

The free version has never limited me in any way for my needs. Theres a cloud, sharing dashboard thing that costs money, but I never needed it since I only need to share static pdf reports.

Re: Ask HN: What data visualization tools do you use?

#5

Post by rboyd » Fri, Mar 05, 2021, 5:30 PM UTC

Grafana, Kibana

Re: Ask HN: What data visualization tools do you use?

#6

Post by vietjtnguyen » Fri, Mar 05, 2021, 7:27 PM UTC

Outputting vnlog, using those tools to filter, and then plotting using feedgnuplot have covered most of my visualization needs.

https://github.com/dkogan/vnlog

https://github.com/dkogan/feedgnuplot

Re: Ask HN: What data visualization tools do you use?

#7

Post by kowlo » Fri, Mar 05, 2021, 8:19 PM UTC

D3.js(https://d3js.org),

Chord Pro (https://datacrayon.com/shop/product/chord-pro/),

Plotly (https://plotly.com),

Plotly Dash (https://plotly.com/dash/)

Re: Ask HN: What data visualization tools do you use?

#8

Post by chordol » Fri, Mar 05, 2021, 9:26 PM UTC

https://www.metabase.com/ It’s open source BI tool which works nice out of the box and it’s low maintenance. Dashboards are you easy to create. It connects to a bunch of DBs.

Re: Ask HN: What data visualization tools do you use?

#9

Post by ploika » Sat, Mar 06, 2021, 1:17 PM UTC

R Shiny is another good option that hasn't been mentioned yet. If you just want to amuse yourself building a "works on my machine" dashboard you can't go far wrong with it.

Re: Ask HN: What data visualization tools do you use?

#10

Post by msantos » Sat, Mar 06, 2021, 1:22 PM UTC

Haven't done much BI work recently, but normally my approach boils down to:

a) OpenRefine (formerly Google Refine) for cleaning and filtering - i.e. exploring and making sense of new data dumps

b) Grafana for dashboards, once the data structures are defined.

c) looking forward to this Pinterest-backed data explorer https://www.querybook.org/