DATAcated Visualization

Tools Guide 2021

Overview of the commonly used data visualization tools

January 2021
By Kate Strachnyi
Founder & Instructor,
DATAcated Academy

DATAcatedAcademy.com
Table of Contents

Topic Page

Introduction 4

Tableau Public 5

Power BI 6

Python (Plotly | Dash) 7

R (Shiny) 8

Excel 9

Google Data Studio 10

Qlik Sense 11

Looker 12

Sisense 13

Datawrapper 14

Chartio 15

Domo 16

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Table of Contents (Continued)

Topic Page

Tellius 17

ThoughtSpot 18

Pyramid Analytics 19

Infogram 20

Flourish 21

AWS QuickSight 22

Databox 23

TIBCO Spotfire 24

Conclusion 25

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Introduction

Overview: There are several data visualization tools available for data analysts, data scientists,
and business users. This guide that outlines some of the features for each tool to provide a
method of comparison for those looking for a good data visualization tool to explore.

Background: My name is Kate Strachnyi and I absolutely love visualizing data and telling
impactful data stories. Though I strongly believe that the tool (technology) itself doesn’t matter as
much as the ability to convey information to your audience, it still plays an important role in
helping those that work with data, to form visuals.

Personal Experience: The first tool I ever used to visualize data was Excel (some basic charts
and graphs), and quickly moved into using Tableau when I was starting out with data
visualization. The tool was easy to learn (mostly because it’s like an Excel pivot table with drag
and drop capabilities); though it does have some complex operation capabilities as well. After
using Tableau for a few years, I moved on to learning Power BI and Qlik, and later R and Python
to visualize data. In addition to those tools, I wanted to explore and learn about all the others that
were available in the market; therefore, this document was formed.

“The term ‘DATAcated’

means dedicated to data”
Feel free to share the
document with your
data friends!

Contents: What follows is a one-page summary of each of the data visualization tools, including
- cost & trial information, data connections, chart types, formatting options, ease of use, mobile
access, and more! This document was first published in August 2020 (with 12 tools) and was
since updated to include 8 more tools (thanks to Jeannette for her help in getting this updated).

Other Tools: This list does not include every data visualization tool out there, if you want to
suggest a tool for us to include in the next iteration of the document, please send a message to:
info@storybydata.com

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 “Our mission is to help people see and understand
data. It represents one of the great opportunities for
Tableau Public human advancement this century: profoundly
impacting health care, energy efficiency, political
Founded in 2003 outcomes, industrial performance, international
cooperation and scientific advancement.”

Description: Software that can allow Cost & Trial: Tableau Public is free to use.
anyone to connect to a spreadsheet or file Tableau Desktop provides a 14-day trial; after
and create interactive data visualizations which it’s $70 a month – for the Creator license
for the web.

Data Connections: Tableau Public allows you to connect to Excel, CSV, JSON, PDF, OData, Google
Sheets, etc. The paid version includes many additional connection options.. You can connect multiple data
sets with unions, joins, and blends. Use Tableau Public to visualize only public (not private) data.

Data Prep: The data interpreter can be used to clean a messy data set. You can strip out titles, footnotes,
and empty cells, as well as fix column headers that run across several rows and reshape the data.

Chart Types: Several chart types are included in the Show Me tool (bar chart, line graph, pie chart, tree
map, table, map view, bullet graph, etc.).

Visual Aesthetics & Customization: Default views are aesthetically pleasing with extensive ability to
customize and format the visuals.

Sample Dashboard

Ease of Use: Drag & drop functionality

allows even the ultra-beginners to
visualize data and create complex
formulas, as needed.

Mobile Friendly: Device designer

gives you the ability to design, preview,
and customize dashboard appearance
on phones, tablets, etc.

Customer Support & Community:

Sharing & Publishing: You can publish a Extensive support includes guides,
workbook to Tableau Public. Anyone with a link to manuals, and training videos. There
the workbook can see its contents. Workbooks are several user groups and forums of
and the underlying data saved to Tableau Public active and engaged community
are accessible to the public. members to connect with.

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 “Our mission is to empower every person and
every organization on the planet to achieve more.”
Power BI
Founded in 2013

Description: Software with an Cost & Trial: Power BI is free to use. Power BI
interface simple enough for end Pro is $10 a month per user
users to create their own reports and
dashboards.

Data Connections: Connects to most types of on-premise databases and they have a large and growing list
of cloud-based connection options as well. Not great for dealing with huge sets of data to analyze; users will
experience a lot of time-outs and slow performance.

Data Prep: Offers Query Editor; a powerful tool with several data prep and wrangling features. Power BI Pro
provides access to dataflows; used to ingest, cleanse, transform, integrate, enrich, and schematize data from
a large array of transactional and observational sources, encompassing all data preparation logic.

Chart Types: Microsoft Power BI has around 16 different chart types, which is a reasonable amount if you
want to represent your data in a variety of formats and visualizations.

Visual Aesthetics & Customization: Several customization options to format the visualizations. Default
views are acceptable.
Sample Dashboard

Ease of Use: Simple and easy to use

drag & drop interface. Can become
complex depending on the task.

Mobile Friendly: Power BI Mobile

apps give you a 360-degree view of
your data—on the go.

Customer Support & Community: An

online database that contains guides,
FAQs and a search bar to find the
Sharing & Publishing: Publish to web option, specific information and support.
allows you to embed interactive Power BI content Support staff can be directly contacted
in blog posts, websites, emails, or social media. at any time through a live chat feature
You can also easily edit, update, refresh, or stop on its website. Companies are also
sharing your published visuals. welcome to ask questions on the
Power BI Community.

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 “The mission of the Python Software Foundation is
to promote, protect, and advance the Python
Python (Plotly | Dash) programming language, and to support and
facilitate the growth of a diverse and international
Founded in 2012 community of Python programmers.”

Description: Dash is a Python framework Cost & Trial: Plotly's open-source graphing
for building web applications. It enables libraries are free to use, and don't require account
you to build dashboards using pure Python. registration. Plotly also has commercial offerings,
(Dash Enterprise and Chart Studio Enterprise).

Data Connections: Dash can connect to any data sources that Python can connect to; this includes CSV
files, databases, etc.

Data Prep: Clean and prepare your data for plotting using Pandas - a data manipulation and analysis library;
capabilities include dealing with missing values, inconsistent formatting, malformed records, or nonsensical
outliers.

Chart Types: Dash comes with a graph component that renders charts with plotly.js. Plotly.js is a great fit for
Dash: it’s declarative, open source, fast, and supports a complete range of charts.

Visual Aesthetics & Customization: Every aesthetic element of the app is customizable: The sizing, the
positioning, the colors, the fonts. Dash apps are built and published in the Web, so the full power of CSS is
available.
Sample Dashboard

Ease of Use: Using Plotly Dash

requires the user to know how to code
(Python). This is not a simple drag-and
drop tool.

Mobile Friendly: Since Dash apps are

viewed in the web browser, Dash is
inherently cross-platform and mobile
ready.

Customer Support & Community:

Has a community forum at with a topic
Sharing & Publishing: Dash apps are rendered dedicated on Dash. This forum is great
in the web browser. You can deploy your apps to for showing off projects, feature
servers and then share them through URLs. requests, and general questions. If you
have found a bug, you can open an
issue on GitHub at plotly/dash.

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 “Create free and open-source software for
data science, scientific research, and
R (Shiny) technical communication.”

Founded in 2012

Description: Shiny is an open source R Cost & Trial: R Shiny is free, open source, and
package that provides an elegant and available from GitHub.
powerful web framework for building web
applications using R.

Data Connections: Shiny can connect to any data sources that R can connect to; this includes CSV files,
databases, etc. .

Data Prep: Clean and prep your data with packages from the Tidyverse. The core packages are ggplot2,
dplyr, tidyr, readr, purrr, tibble, stringr, and forcats, which provide functionality to model, transform, and
visualize data.

Chart Types: R allows you to design several chart types including, bar charts, line graphs, pie charts,
geographic views, etc.

Visual Aesthetics & Customization: You can give your Shiny app a special look with Cascading Style
Sheets (CSS). There are several color themes, or skins available.

Sample Dashboard

Ease of Use: Using R Shiny requires

the user to know how to code (R). This
is not a simple drag-and drop tool.

Mobile Friendly: R Shiny Dashboards

are flexible and easy to specify row and
column-based layouts with intelligent
re-sizing to fill the browser and adapted
for display on mobile devices.

Sharing & Publishing: You can share your Shiny Customer Support & Community:
app as R scripts or as a web page. R scripts only Includes several articles and tutorials,
work if your users have R on their own computer as well as an RStudio Community. You
(and know how to use it). Sharing as a web page can also check the "shiny" tag on Stack
is the most user-friendly way to share a Shiny Overflow for existing answers, or post
app. Your users can navigate to your app through your own question.
the internet with a web browser.
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 “Our mission is to empower every person and
every organization on the planet to achieve more.”
Excel
Founded in 1985

Description: Microsoft Excel is an electronic Cost & Trial: Microsoft provides a 1-month trial;
spreadsheet program that is used for storing, after which it’s $10 a month – which includes
organizing, and manipulating data. several other programs (Word, PowerPoint, etc)

Data Connections: The data may be stored directly in the workbook, or it may be stored in an external data
source, such as a text file, a database, or an Online Analytical Processing (OLAP) cube.

Data Prep: Perform basic data analysis functions – including trim, split, standardize, replace data, check for
outliers, etc. If you are dealing with large data sets, it will cause Excel to become slow when performing
certain operations, simply try the operation with a small sample before applying it to the whole data set.

Chart Types: Several chart options are available and pre-packaged in Excel’s Chart Tools, including bar
chart, pie chart, line graph, donut chart, etc.

Visual Aesthetics & Customization: Excel includes several formatting and customization options that you
can use to design visually appealing data visualizations.

Sample Dashboard

Ease of Use: Most people are familiar

with Excel (it’s typically the first data
analysis tool we are exposed to.)
There’s no requirement to code in
order to visualize your data.

Mobile Friendly: Microsoft Excel

Mobile is used for reviewing, updating,
and creating spreadsheets on Windows
phones and tablets.

Sharing & Publishing: You can share your Customer Support & Community:
dashboard with people by creating a Microsoft Microsoft provides training and
Group. You can also publish your Excel tutorials, community forums, as well as
workbooks directly to your Power BI workspace. other support.

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 “To empower people to identify and share insights
from their data—whether it’s a marketer surfacing
Google Data Studio information about which of their advertising
channels is most effective, or a business analyst
Founded in 2018 tracking performance metrics.”

Description: A data visualization tool that Cost & Trial: Google Data Studio is free of
lets you build interactive dashboards and charge.
custom reporting.

Data Connections: Connect to Google Marketing Platform products, databases, flat files, and social media
platforms. It supports only a single data source. When creating tables, graphs, and charts, you can extract
data from a single source instead of multiple channels.

Data Prep: There are capabilities for formatting and cleaning integrated datasets to prepare them for
analysis. A developer resource will most likely be needed to automate the prep of the data.

Chart Types: It comes with several charts, including line, bar, pie, geo maps, area and bubble graphs,
paginated data tables, pivot tables, and more.

Visual Aesthetics & Customization: Create reports which can be easily customized; there are enough
options available here to experiment with colors, fonts, size, labels, and borders. Also, all the charts and
graphs created are visually appealing.

Sample Dashboard

Ease of Use: The tool offers a highly

interactive drag & drop interface where
users can freely resize and align
charts.

Mobile Friendly: Visualizations you

create for desktop view will not scale
down to mobile screens. There’s a
workaround to Data Studio’s mobile
limitations, assuming you’re willing to
do some work.

Sharing & Publishing: It allows the users to

view the reports only online. The report created Customer Support & Community:
through it cannot be exported as a CSV, PDF or There are videos, tutorials, quick start
any other file type. The only way of sharing the guides, community, as well as other
reports created in Google Data Studio is by support.
sharing the URL.

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 “Our vision is for a data-literate world. Where
people, businesses, organizations, and
Qlik Sense governments tackle their most complex challenges
with data. That’s what excites us here at Qlik.”
Founded in 1993

Description: A complete data analytics Cost & Trial: Qlik provides a 1-month trial; after
platform, from self-service visualization and which it’s $30 a month per user.
exploration to guided analytics apps and
dashboards.

Data Connections: Unify disparate data sources on a single platform. When manipulating views and
dimensions, irrelevant data is “grayed out”, so you’re still able to discover hidden trends.

Data Prep: You can edit all the data tables and can rename the table and fields in the data table and update
the fields from the data source. You can also add a calculated fields and adjust date and time formats.

Chart Types: There’s a wide range of visualizations to use with your data. Chart suggestions enable you to
select data fields and let Qlik Sense choose the dimensions, measures, and visualization types. As you add
or remove fields, the suggested visualization adjusts itself based on your changes.

Visual Aesthetics & Customization: You create visualizations from pre-defined charts, fields, or custom
objects. You can edit and refine your visualizations to improve design and enhance presentation.

Sample Dashboard

Ease of Use: Provides drag-and-drop

capabilities offer easy dashboard and
report creation without the need for
scripting, complex queries or joins.

Mobile Friendly: Whether on desktop,

tablet or smartphone (or if you’re
simply changing the size of your
browser window), Qlik Sense
automatically adjusts to give you the
best view of its apps.

Sharing & Publishing: You publish an app to a

stream. Those who have access rights to a stream Customer Support & Community:
can analyze data by interacting with the Includes telephone support, self-help
visualizations in the app. You can also publish an resources, product updates, and
app to a collection, making it available to users training / tutorials.
outside of your Qlik Sense Enterprise deployment.

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 “Bringing better insights and data-driven
decisions to every business.”
Looker
Founded in 2012

Description: A business intelligence Cost & Trial: Looker doesn’t publicly release
software and big data analytics platform pricing information. Pricing specialists work to
that helps you explore, analyze and share create an ideal pricing structure for businesses.
real-time business analytics easily.

Data Connections: Connect with Redshift, Snowflake, BigQuery, as well as 50+ supported SQL dialects, so
you can connect to multiple databases, avoid database lock-in, and maintain multi-cloud data environments.

Data Prep: LookML helps users develop custom models within the platform. Persistent Derived Table (PDT)
can be used for certain data preparation use cases.

Chart Types: It supports about 15 different types of charts with standard customization such as color palette,
series types (line, area, scatter, etc.) and other typical charts.

Visual Aesthetics & Customization: You can customize a visualization to make the data more readable
and to add visual styling. You can also modify the Looker theme.

Sample Dashboard

Ease of Use: Includes drag-and-drop

functionality with no coding required.

Mobile Friendly: When viewing a

dashboard tile visualization on a mobile
device, Looker has touch options to
make it easier to view information
about your data.

Customer Support & Community:

Looker offers a public help center that
Sharing & Publishing: You can send a Look or contains a wealth of information, in
dashboard immediately in an email to yourself or published documents and videos. It
other people or send the results to another data also offers email support and provides
destination. Publish a Look with a public URL to training on its platform.
an audience.

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 “To simplify business analytics for complex
data. We are pushing this concept across the
Sisense entire BI value chain and embedding
analytics in the physical world.”
Founded in 2004

Description: A business analytics platform Cost & Trial: Sisense doesn’t publicly release
that enables users to join and analyze pricing information; need to contact them for price
large data sets from multiple sources and a quote. They offer a 240-day trial.
create visualizations.

Data Connections: Sisense has native connectors to many SQL databases, NoSQL sources, and popular
web applications. There are two ways you can connect to your data sources: live or using ElastiCube.

Data Prep: Powerful features including query revision history, autocomplete, formatting, snippets, and
exploration mode enable you to go from query to answer in seconds.

Chart Types: Sisense provides users with easy-to-understand dashboards that are well designed with good
widgets, varied chart types, and informative KPI and metrics views.

Visual Aesthetics & Customization: Creates visually rich graphics that can be exported into various
formats and having easy access to various sources, such as Google AdWords, to gather their data.

Sample Dashboard

Ease of Use: Though Sisense’s

Elasticube™ allows the software to
quickly pull large data sets, it’s difficult
to create for the average user.

Mobile Friendly: Has a mobile app for

quick access. You can explore your
dashboards with simple gestures
optimized to let you dive deep into your
data or apply filters to view the data
you want.

Sharing & Publishing: Owners can share Customer Support & Community:
dashboards that they have created with other Customers have a designated
Sisense users. The Sisense web application is not Engagement Manager, and access to
configured to be publicly accessible by default. tech support, professional services and
There are steps you can take to make your more. Portal includes resources,
Sisense instance accessible to anyone on the videos, etc.
internet.
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 “To let everyone create better
and more charts”
Datawrapper
Founded in 2012

Description: A tool that makes it easy Cost & Trial: Free plan to publish graphics
for journalists and other communicators professionally. There are professional and
to create simple charts and maps for enterprise solutions offered for monthly / annual fee.
web articles.

Data Connections: Five options to upload your data: 1) Copy & paste the data 2) Import from a CSV 3)
Import from an Excel file 4) Link to a Google Sheet or 5) Create and connect a data source for updates.

Data Prep: You need to clean up the data first in spreadsheet software like Excel or Google Sheets; prior to
bringing it into Datawrapper.

Chart Types: Datawrapper River features hundreds of charts that other Datawrapper users built and which
you can reuse. Includes expected charts (bar chart, line graph, pie chart, etc.)

Visual Aesthetics & Customization: Design defaults are based on years of experience in data
visualization, which keeps your charts easy to understand. No design skills required. Change colors,
margins, fonts, and add elements like logos. Includes color-blind check.

Sample Dashboard

Ease of Use: Datawrapper empowers

everyone to create digitally optimized
charts, maps, and tables. It's as easy
as following four steps; no code
required.

Mobile Friendly: Charts, maps &

tables you create with Datawrapper are
readable on all devices. Labels adjust,
fewer grid lines appear, and the font
size stays the same.

Sharing & Publishing: To publish, you can either Customer Support & Community:
share a URL or copy the embed code. Datawrapper Academy includes
Datawrapper has an option to update charts several tutorials and training materials.
automatically without republishing. Support can be reached via email or
set up a call.

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 “Make data accessible to anyone
That means empowering anyone—not just
Chartio data teams—to easily understand the data
they need to succeed at their jobs.”
Founded in 2010

Description: A cloud-based business Cost & Trial: Chartio provides a 14-day trial; after
analytics solution that enables everyone which it’s $40 a month per user.
within an organization to access, explore,
transform, and visualize their data.

Data Connections: Chartio offers integrations with most major data sources, including these leading
services: Amazon Redshift, Snowflake, Google Sheets, CSV files, Oracle, etc.

Data Prep: The Dataset Interface is where you build your queries. Add a dataset for each separate query
you want to include in your chart. The Data Pipeline allows you to join datasets and apply transformations to
your data results.

Chart Types: Choose from dozens of chart types to create the best possible visualization of your data.

Visual Aesthetics & Customization: Customize details like your charts’ titles, colors, and refresh intervals
to meet your needs. Rearrange and resize your charts to get your favorite layout and add or delete charts at
any time.

Sample Dashboard

Ease of Use: Designed to enable

business users who are unfamiliar with
SQL to perform complex analyses of
multiple data sources. Connect Chartio
to a database and begin analyzing their
data within minutes.

Mobile Friendly: Chartio is fully

functional and scales well on any
modern browser, including browsers on
the majority of mobile devices.

Customer Support & Community:

Sharing & Publishing: Copy a customizable Access to expert advisors, free training
code snippet to embed a real-time, interactive sessions, in-depth guides and more,
version of your dashboard on your own site. Includes a live chat, working sessions,
Export your charts and dashboards in popular Slack communication and office hours.
formats like PDF, PNG or SVG with just a click.

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 “Domo optimizes your business by connecting you to
the data, people, and expertise you need to improve
Domo business results. Domo helps every employee – from
the CEO to the front-line worker – optimize business
Founded in 2010 performance by connecting them to the right data and
people they need to improve business results”

Description: A cloud-based platform Cost & Trial: Domo doesn’t publicly release
designed to provide direct access to pricing information; need to contact them for price
business data for decision makers across quote. They offer a trial (not clear on duration).
the company with minimal IT involvement.

Data Connections: Tap into, connect or combine thousands of datasets from any on-premises or cloud
source, with dynamic data transformations done on-the-fly (with over a thousand pre-built connectors).

Data Prep: Domo’s drag-and-drop ETL solutions make it simple for anyone to pull data from multiple
sources, process and transform it, and load it into Domo. Domo’s Magic ETL platform allows you to visualize
your data flows and define operations, previewing as you go.

Chart Types: There are dozens of chart types available in Domo, from basic bar and pie charts to more
advanced chart types, tables, and maps.

Visual Aesthetics & Customization: Use the Analyzer tool to change how data on a card is presented and
make changes with just a few clicks. Customize your page layout to emphasize certain points.

Sample Dashboard

Ease of Use: Drag & drop functionality

allows even the ultra-beginners to
visualize data. Able to create complex
formulas, as needed.

Mobile Friendly: Domo is ‘mobile-first’

focused. The Domo mobile app
delivers information you need,
wherever you happen to be.

Sharing & Publishing: Quickly export Customer Support & Community:

visualizations into common software applications Committed to answering data and
(PowerPoint, CSV, Excel, Print, Email). business questions; support resources
Publication groups let you share a pre-filtered are available 24/7. Includes training
view of a dashboard with someone outside your and tutorials and access to dojo – the
organization. Personalized Data Permissions, or Domo community.
PDP for internal sharing.
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 “Tellius’ mission is to provide automatic data analysis
to users through machine learning and a search-
Tellius enabled engine to help them get better business
insights. It aims to do that through an easy-to-use
Founded in 2015 interface so all users, regardless of their technical
skills, can work with big data and find faster insights.”

Description: A business intelligence and Cost & Trial: Tellius doesn’t publicly display its
analytics platform powered by machine pricing information. Please contact the vendor
learning so anyone can ask questions in directly for a quote.
plain language and discover hidden
insights with a single click.

Data Connections: Connect to a wide variety of relational databases, applications, big data sources, and
files. With the Spark in-memory compute engine, Tellius can use your existing Hadoop infrastructure without
moving data. Data can come from applications, data lakes, data warehouse, spreadsheets, and more.

Data Prep: Data transformation – automated data profiling and custom calculations and data transformation
prepares data for query and analysis. Data fusion – combines data from multiple sources and joins datasets
for ease of end user query. Data pipelines – create automated data workflows to automatically connect,
transform, join, and even train machine learning models on a scheduled basis

Chart Types: Tellius supports variety chart types so that you can use them to illustrate your data as per your
requirement: line, bar, pie, area, scatter charts, etc.

Visual Aesthetics & Customization: Customize the analytics experience by tuning machine learning
models and teaching the AI engine your business vocabulary

Sample Dashboard

Ease of Use: Automated discovery of

insights saves days and weeks from
manual data exploration with
embedded machine learning algorithms
that uncover relationships, trends, and
anomalies in your data.

Mobile Friendly: Tellius is mobile

friendly.

Customer Support & Community:

Sharing & Publishing: After adding all required Users can contact Tellius by email or
dataset, joining them appropriately, and selecting phone during regular business hours.
the required columns from the resulting dataset, They can also access Tellius’ help
you can publish your business view. When you guides to troubleshoot issues.
share the Insight, Tellius also shares the business
view, datasets, and data sources associated with
the Insight in the same sharing mode.
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 “We believe the world would be a better place if
everyone had easier access to facts. ThoughtSpot
ThoughtSpot exists to create a more fact-driven world through
simple, yet easy to use technology.”
Founded in 2012

Description: A cloud-based Search and Cost & Trial: ThoughtSpot offers consumption or
AI-driven analytics platform that capacity-based pricing, with unlimited users. They
empowers non-technical business users have a 30-day free trial.
to answer their own questions.

Data Connections: Connect and run live search queries in your data warehouse. Full value indexing lets
you search down to the most granular data value, not just data columns or metadata. Connect to any data
source on-premises or in the cloud, including data repositories, enterprise applications, or flat files. Also
supports industry standard ODBC/JDBC interfaces.

Data Prep: Automated data prep for Search and AI-Driven insight across billions of row data. Modeling for
search capabilities include: inferred relationships between data sets, automated data model creation,
combining data sets, creating custom calculations, defining synonyms, and renaming and mapping columns.

Chart Types: AI-driven best fit visualization creation based on search query. Charts automatically generated
include column, pie, line, geo, scatter, and more. Automatically generated charts can be easily customized

Visual Aesthetics & Customization: Consumer-grade search experience that gives every business user
the ability to answer their own data questions, no matter how complex. ThoughtSpot understands your
question using NLP, calculates an answer and chooses the best fit visualization. Create shared metadata
models complete with business logic on combined datasets to ensure consistent answers. Specific
onboarding flows by role tailor the experience for users, accelerating adoption and their time to value.

Sample Search and Answers

Ease of Use: Minimum setup and
weekly sales by store by product type configuration, simply connect to your
data and start asking questions on
billions of rows of data in a consumer-
grade search experience in minutes.
Consumer-grade UX, leads to rapid
business user adoption.

Mobile Friendly: Explore all your

company’s data with a tap, whether
you’re online or not. Includes
automated alerting against changes in
key KPIs.
Sharing & Publishing: Whenever you are
working in ThoughtSpot, you are in your own
Customer Support & Community:
private environment until you share your work with
ThoughtSpot offers a variety of free
others. Sharing applies to Searches, Pinboards,
resources for customers, such as
and any Search data models that are all indexed
videos, webinars, and whitepapers, as
and made searchable. You can follow pinboards
well as training. Support staff can be
and metrics, and request access to content you
reached through an online support18
don't have permissions to.
portal, email, and phone.
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 “Pyramid adapts to users' needs. It provides different
capabilities and experiences based on individual
Pyramid Analytics needs and skills, all while managing content as a
shared resource. It is designed to support your
Founded in 2008 organization's entire decision workflow.”

Description: Pyramid Analytics provides Cost & Trial: Pyramid Analytics doesn’t publicly
insights for every employee across the release pricing information; need to contact them
organization with enterprise-level business for price quote. They offer a 30-day trial.
analytics software.

Data Connections: The Data Sources page allows admins to manage all the various data sources and
servers for querying and / or data modeling. Use the machine learning marketplace to find and use existing
data science algorithms. Inject machine learning algorithms into datasets before modeling.

Data Prep: In the Model module, users can prepare data and build data models. There is also the Business
User ETL, a drag-and-drop interface for cleaning and preparing raw data for analysis.

Chart Types: There are dozens of chart types available in Pyramid Analytics, from basic bar and pie charts
to more advanced chart types, tables, and maps.

Visual Aesthetics & Customization: The Illustrate module allows users to add text, infographics or
illustrations of their data: Dynamic infographics and data-driven dynamic text, Reusable, sharable content
across presentations and publications, Composite visualizations (layered SVG and raster images), Custom
visual workflows to illustrate processes.

Sample Dashboard
Ease of Use: In the model module, there
is the Business User ETL, a drag-and-drop
interface for cleaning and preparing raw
data for analysis.

Mobile Friendly: The app gives you the

freedom to travel with advanced analytics,
dynamic dashboards, and scheduled
reports, all while connecting directly to
your organization's enterprise data
warehouse.

Customer Support & Community: The

Free plan includes online help, online
Sharing & Publishing: Pyramid gives users tutorials and a community forum. Silver,
tremendous power to create presentations from Gold, Platinum plans provide additional
distinct data sources and guide others through a support.
rich and highly interactive data-driven
environment. In the Publish module, users can
create narratives of their data.

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 “Infogram enables faster publishing of data-driven
content, helping your team publish beautiful charts,
Infogram infographics, maps and reports.”

Founded in 2012

Description: Infogram is a data Cost & Trial: Infogram pricing starts at $25.00
visualization company that helps people per month. There is a free version. Infogram
create infographics, reports, dashboards, offers a free trial.
maps, charts and social media assets.

Data Connections: Each chart comes pre-populated with placeholder data to show how your indicators
should be formatted when inserted into the chart. You can enter your data manually, copy-paste them, upload
spreadsheets, as well as add the indicators from external sources.

Data Prep: The intuitive and lightweight editor allows you to structure data, customize styles and colors
easily, set the display options, and add icons.

Chart Types: Infogram is a great tool to build detailed and beautiful looking infographics, graphs and more
than 35 chart types or diagrams.

Visual Aesthetics & Customization: It enables you to share your visualization on social media or embed
them using an interactive HTML option.

Sample Dashboard

Ease of Use: Infogram also lets you

pull together various elements into a
well-defined output by simply dragging
and dropping your chosen tools. With
it, you can achieve a professional-
looking presentation without all the
complicated processes.

Mobile Friendly: Infogram uses state-

of-the-art technologies to offer the best
possible experience for the web and
mobile devices.
Sharing & Publishing: By default, all Infogram
projects display a Share button that allows
viewers to share your content on social platforms, Customer Support & Community:
as well as embed it on other webpages by using On the phone or online support
our embed codes. available.

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 “Flourish can be used to scale and manage any kind
of interactive content. Developers can easily add
Flourish bespoke private templates to your account. Think of it
as your CMS for interactive content.”
Founded in 2016

Description: A cloud platform data Cost & Trial: The free account gives you access
visualization platform to create powerful to the full range of Flourish templates – with no
and interactive data stories. It is a perfect limits to how many visualizations you can create
medium to create different types of map and publish.
data visualizations with minimum effort.

Data Connections: You can upload your data on the existing geographical map templates or upload your
own geographic boundary file.

Data Prep: Once you upload your data in the required format, you can click the ‘Preview’ data tab and
change the visualization settings available on the right side of the page.

Chart Types: Easily turn your data into stunning charts, maps and interactive stories. Includes bar charts,
pie charts, scatter plots, etc.

Visual Aesthetics & Customization: Flourish has this Connections globe template that lets you visualize
mobility seamlessly. Having the geographical coordinates of the source and destination is sufficient to create
the connections globe map. This visualization is highly interactive, and you can rotate and zoom in the globe
as required.

Sample Dashboard

Ease of Use: Flourish comes with six

preloaded templates for making
interactive map visualizations. You
have lots of design and display options
available to customize the map.

Mobile Friendly: Flourish graphics

work on all screen sizes.

Customer Support & Community:

Contact experts@flourish.studio and let
Sharing & Publishing: Once you create your us know what kind of project you have
story you can publish it in Flourish server and in mind. We’ll help you find the right
embed the story in any online resource. people.

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 “QuickSight lets you easily create and publish interactive
BI dashboards that include Machine Learning-powered
AWS QuickSight insights. QuickSight dashboards can be accessed from
any device, and seamlessly embedded into your
Founded in 2010 applications, portals, and websites.”

Description: A cloud-based scalable, Cost & Trial: Offers a pay-per-session model for
serverless, embeddable service that lets dashboard readers. Instead of paying a fixed
you easily create and publish interactive license cost per month, readers are billed $0.30
BI dashboards that include Machine for a 30-minute session up to a maximum charge
Learning-powered insights. of $5/reader/month for unlimited use.

Data Connections: The platform integrates with data sources like Amazon Redshift, Amazon Athena,
Amazon S3, Amazon Aurora, Apache Spark, Presto, SQL servers, local Excel files, and more. It also
supports information from services like Salesforce and Tableau.

Data Prep: You can improve the performance of database data sets by importing the data into SPICE
instead of using a direct query to the database. SPICE stores your data in a system created for high
availability, where it is saved until you choose to delete it.

Chart Types: There are dozens of chart types available, from basic bar and pie charts to more advanced
chart types, tables, and maps.

Visual Aesthetics & Customization: AutoGraph uses an algorithm to automatically choose visual
presentations for the data you select. You can then select your own visualizations from selections like heat
maps, treemaps, combination charts, pivot tables, and more. You can also change the colors, apply filters,
and reorganize their positions.

Sample Dashboard

Ease of Use: Allows users without

coding knowledge to explore data and
extract different insights.

Mobile Friendly: The mobile app

enables you to securely get insights
from your data from anywhere.

Customer Support & Community:

Sharing & Publishing: After you publish a With QuickSight, you can ask business
dashboard, you can share it with other users or questions of your data in plain
groups, and choose the level of access to grant language and receive answers in
them. You can also choose to share with all users seconds. Visit the Amazon QuickSight
in your Amazon QuickSight subscription. community forum to get your questions
answered and provide your feedback.
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 “Databox pulls all your data into one place, so you
can track performance and discover insights in real-
time. It helps users predictably improve performance
Databox over time and take control of their career. These
marketers, sale reps, execs, etc. often have data
Founded in 2011 stored in multiple platforms.”

Description: Databox is a business Cost & Trial: Databox offers a free edition, Basic
analytics platform that pulls data into one ($49), Plus ($99), and Business ($248). They also
place so you can track performance and offer a custom plan and a free trial.
discover insights in real-time.

Data Connections: With our simple REST API and SDKs, just pick your favorite language (Java, PHP,
Ruby, Node.js, GO, or Python) and you’ll be able to connect any data source in minutes. Connect via any of
our 70+ integrations, connect to data stored in Google Sheets or a SQL database, send via API or Zapier.

Data Prep: With Query Builder, you can use dimensions and filters to build custom metrics that allow you to
pull more granular performance insights.

Chart Types: Use Databox to build line graphs, pie charts, tables and more.

Visual Aesthetics & Customization: Select different visualization types – tables, line graphs, bar graphs,
number blocks, gauges, and 13 more – for any metric; pick from available time intervals including today,
yesterday, this week, week-to-date, month-to-date, this year, and many more; compare current performance
to the previous time period or a year ago; add goals, trend lines and averages – all without writing any code.

Sample Dashboard

Ease of Use: Using the Datablock

Library, you can easily drag-and-drop
the most popular visualizations for any
metric from any data source right into
your dashboard.

Mobile Friendly: The Databox Mobile

app allows you and your team to view
all of your Databoards, track your
progress toward company goals,
receive important alerts on
performance, and more, all from your
pocket.
Sharing & Publishing: Databoards can easily be
shared and accessed through the Shareable Link. Customer Support & Community:
The Shareable Link is a unique page outside of Offers online support during business
the Databox app where your Databoards are hours.
accessible.

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 “TIBCO Spotfire is the most complete analytics
solution on the market, enabling everyone to explore
TIBCO Spotfire and visualize new discoveries in data through
immersive dashboards and advanced analytics.
Founded in 1996 Spotfire® analytics delivers capabilities at scale,
including predictive analytics, geolocation analytics,
and streaming analytics.”

Description: Spotfire is a powerful Cost & Trial: TIBCO Spotfire doesn’t publicly
enterprise-grade analytical platform for release pricing information; need to contact them
deriving valuable business insights. for price quote. They offer a 30-day trial.

Data Connections: Easily connect to and blend data from relational and NoSQL databases; OLAP; Apache
Drill, Hadoop, and Spark SQL; Impala; SAP HANA; and many others—and to cloud applications like Amazon
Redshift, Databricks, RDS, Microsoft Azure SQL Database, Google Analytics, and Salesforce.

Data Prep: Combine, clean, enrich, and transform data from a variety of sources, including big data
sources—all directly within the analysis environment. Edit inline with an auto-recorded, editable, sharable
lineage that supports audit needs.

Chart Types: There are dozens of chart types available in TIBCO Spotfire, from bar and pie charts to more
advanced chart types, tables, and maps.

Visual Aesthetics & Customization: It visualizes, interacts, and shares the data to find out the risk and
opportunities in the analysis. Deploys visualization through graphs, 3D charts, and other interactive forms.

Sample Dashboard

Ease of Use: Drag & drop functionality

allows even the ultra-beginners to
visualize data. Able to create complex
formulas, as needed.

Mobile Friendly: Represents the state

of the art in visual data discovery,
analytic applications and self-service
dashboard creation; with mobile apps.

Customer Support & Community:

Sharing & Publishing: You can share an analysis Provides support management,
to the public, with a select group of people, or enterprise-wide knowledge search,
within a TIBCO Cloud™ Spotfire® team. Any documentation, downloads, case
analysis can be published to the library and opened filing/support management, and the
with Spotfire Web Player. TIBCO Community.

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Conclusion
Purpose: Each of the tools discussed serve a purpose and serve a unique audience. Some tools are better
for specific data visualization needs. In the end, the tool truly doesn’t matter – it’s all about addressing the
business need and making sure your audience receives the message you want to impart.

Gratitude: I’m so excited that you read the DATAcated Visualization Tools Guide and hope you were able
to find all the information you were searching for. I’m grateful to the amazing data community for your
continued support.

Updates: The document will continue to evolve and will be updated with additional data visualization tools.
Let me know if you see something in the document that needs to be corrected.

Data Visualization Courses: If you’re interested in courses on data visualization – go ahead and check
out DATAcatedAcademy.com. We currently have the Visual Best Practices course available – it is product-
agnostic and includes the DATAcated Visual Best Practices Checklist and DATAcated Chart Selector
Guide. Additionally, there are two ‘Data to Dashboard’ courses available for purchase: Data to Dashboard
with Tableau Public and Data to Dashboard with Power BI. The newest addition to the course catalog is the
DATAcated Storytelling course.

Author: Written by Kate Strachnyi, Founder, Story by Data &

DATAcated Academy. LinkedIn Top Voice in Data Science &
Analytics (2018 & 2019). Over 10 years of experience in
consulting, training, data visualization, executive reporting, and
media partnerships.

LinkedIn: kate-strachnyi-data

YouTube: Story by Data

Twitter: StorybyData
KATE STRACHNYI
Email: info@storybydata.com

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