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Ask HN: What data visualization tools do you use?

11 points by navait ↗ HN
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.

11 comments

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NoOneNew
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.
navait
No, it's great. I assumed Power BI cost a lot of money and wouldn't have considered it.
NoOneNew
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.
chordol
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.
ploika
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.
msantos
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/

MmdYw
Seaborn,Superset R GGPlot2
sails
Superset and Redash worth a look. I'd go superset if you are comfortable with python but want some of the prebuilt stuff that Tableau gives you.