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 lic…
Can you comment on highcharts performance?
It looks like highcharts uses SVG under the covers. Canvas based visualizations may fare a little better than SVGs once you're trying to render thousands of data points.
Can't understand why people would downvote this, Highcharts is extremely inexpensive compared to the other costs that go into a commercial product that would require extensive charting and the gained productivity and savings in development time are incredible. Two years ago I migrated a ExtJS web app that had taken 2 years to build to Highcharts + Bootstrap in about a month or two. What amazed me was that for every E…
> Highcharts is extremely inexpensive compared to the other costs that go into a commercial product Yes but Highcharts is extremely expensive compared to other alternatives which are free. Unless you're in the .NET world, no one really pays for libraries and frameworks anymore since the open source alternative is either better or just good enough.
At some point in the decision process you should be weighing the cost of buying software/support vs. the cost of developing it in-house. Highcharts is not expensive compared to developing something similar yourself, unless you have the luxury of a loose schedule and are being paid at something like $10 an hour.
I think the reason these "cost concerns" are being expressed is that a programmer isn't trained to weigh these things objectively. It's like going directly to a surgeon with an ailment and asking their recommended course of action. Their expertise is surgery, so their resolution is more likely to involve a knife.
We used it in my previous companies and our developers were very happy about it. Previously we were using 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 c…
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.
1) As I've already said, High Charts isn't that much better than the free alternatives. 2) If you're bootstrapping, every penny counts. 3) It's not $590, it's $1500 (or more). 4) Not many people pay for libraries or frameworks anymore, when open source alternatives are either better or just good enough.
> 3) It's not $590, it's $1500 (or more). Just wanting to point this out, but the price for a single developer, with support included, is currently $590 according to this page: http://shop.highsoft.com/highcharts.html > 4) Not many people pay for libraries or frameworks anymore, when open source alternatives are either better or just good enough. Not many, sure. But then again, they aren't going for lots of smaller p…
>> 3) It's not $590, it's $1500 (or more).
>Just wanting to point this out, but the price for a single developer, with support included, is currently $590 according to this page: http://shop.highsoft.com/highcharts.html
> Highcharts is extremely inexpensive compared to the other costs that go into a commercial product Yes but Highcharts is extremely expensive compared to other alternatives which are free. Unless you're in the .NET world, no one really pays for libraries and frameworks anymore since the open source alternative is either better or just good enough.
At some point in the decision process you should be weighing the cost of buying software/support vs. the cost of developing it in-house. Highcharts is not expensive compared to developing something similar yourself, unless you have the luxury of a loose schedule and are being paid at something like $10 an hour. I think the reason these "cost concerns" are being expressed is that a programmer isn't trained to weigh th…
> Highcharts is not expensive compared to developing something similar yourself,
Here's what you guys keep ignoring: there's other open source alternatives that are free. I'm not helping develop them beyond giving bug reports.
If you are building a commercial product and 590$ 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…
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 licen…
If you were going to violate their license you just wouldn't pay for it at all. It's free for academic and noncommercial use and you can download the complete library right from their site.
Corporate environments tend to have tools to manage seat-based licensing and smaller companies only have a handful of developers anyway. Typically the number of developers who need to be working with a specific tool is known when you start the project you're buying a license for and upgrading your license isn't exactly tough. I convinced my boss to buy our department a 5 seat license for Highcharts (without support) after doing a pretty exhaustive search for free alternatives with all the features we need and it has been great so far.
It's too expensive and there are plenty of free alternatives like http://c3js.org/ http://www.chartjs.org/ http://nvd3.org/ and plenty more
We (quite successfully) use flot http://www.flotcharts.org/ after I looked at highcharts' license and their "solution" for doing server-side rendering (some dodgy php).
The PHP script[1] is just a simple proxy to pass the SVG content to a well-regarded Apache Batik toolkit which then does the actual SVG->PNG conversion. I suspect PHP was chosen because of it is more readily available than any other backend tech among Highcharts clients.
Flot is a canvas-based library, so it can rely on modern browsers to rasterize canvas drawings to an image within the browser. Rasterizing SVG into an image directly within the browser is technically possible, but not supported across a wide range of browsers, so sending the SVG to the backend for conversion is a valid and very common technique.
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 lic…
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 creat…
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.
