Software Alternatives, Accelerators & Startups

GnuPlot VS PDFMonkey

Compare GnuPlot VS PDFMonkey and see what are their differences

Note: These products don't have any matching categories. If you think this is a mistake, please edit the details of one of the products and suggest appropriate categories.

GnuPlot logo GnuPlot

Gnuplot is a portable command-line driven interactive data and function plotting utility.

PDFMonkey logo PDFMonkey

Automate your PDF generation.
  • GnuPlot Landing page
    Landing page //
    2022-12-13
  • PDFMonkey Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-10-23

PDFMonkey is your automation tool perfect for generating a high volume of PDFs. HTML to PDF with our restless API or with various automation tool such as Zapier, Make or Bubble. Link it with thousands of tools to automate your workflow and simplify your PDF management.

PDFMonkey

$ Details
freemium โ‚ฌ15.0 / Monthly (3000 documents, 7 days retention, Load images, fonts, CSS & JS)
Platforms
Make Bubble Automation Zapier
Release Date
2019 April
Startup details
Country
France
State
Paris
City
Paris
Employees
1 - 9

GnuPlot features and specs

  • Highly Customizable
    GnuPlot offers extensive customization options for creating plots, allowing users to tweak almost every aspect of the graph, including colors, labels, line styles, and more.
  • Scriptable
    GnuPlot can be driven by scripts, making it convenient for automating complex plots and integrating with other software workflows.
  • Wide Range of Output Formats
    It supports many output formats such as PNG, PDF, SVG, and EPS, making it easy to generate graphics for different purposes like presentations, publications, and web content.
  • Cross-Platform
    GnuPlot runs on multiple operating systems, including Windows, macOS, and Linux, ensuring that it can be used in diverse computing environments.
  • Complex Plotting Capabilities
    GnuPlot supports a wide variety of plots, including 2D and 3D plots, histograms, heatmaps, and more, which caters to the needs of advanced visualization requirements.
  • Performance
    GnuPlot is efficient and can handle large datasets with ease, offering fast rendering times which is crucial when dealing with complex visualizations.
  • Free and Open Source
    Being free and open-source software, GnuPlot is accessible to everyone, and users can modify the source code to suit their needs.

Possible disadvantages of GnuPlot

  • Steep Learning Curve
    GnuPlot has a complex syntax and a steep learning curve, especially for beginners who may find it difficult to get started without substantial effort.
  • Limited GUI
    GnuPlot lacks a full-featured graphical user interface (GUI), making it less user-friendly for those who prefer point-and-click interactions over scripting.
  • Documentation
    While comprehensive, the documentation can be overwhelming and difficult to navigate for new users trying to find specific information quickly.
  • Date Handling
    Handling and formatting dates can be cumbersome in GnuPlot, requiring more manual setup compared to other dedicated plotting tools.
  • Interactive Features
    GnuPlot's interactive plotting capabilities are limited compared to other modern plotting tools that offer more dynamic and real-time interactivity.
  • Integration
    Integration with some modern programming environments and languages may not be as seamless as with other plotting libraries specifically designed for those ecosystems (e.g., Matplotlib in Python).

PDFMonkey features and specs

  • Snippets
    Share code between different templates
  • Direct generation
    Generate a PDF when updated informations
  • XML embedding
    Insert XML inside the PDF and generate a PDF 3-A compatible factur-X
  • PDF generation
    PDF generation that you can connect with thousands of tools

Analysis of GnuPlot

Overall verdict

  • Gnuplot is generally considered to be a good choice for those looking for a reliable and flexible plotting tool, especially if the users need robust scriptability or work across different operating systems.

Why this product is good

  • Gnuplot is a powerful, portable, and multi-platform tool capable of producing high-quality 2D and 3D plots. It supports numerous output formats and can be used interactively or in scripts. Additionally, it has a large support community and extensive documentation, making it accessible for both beginners and advanced users.

Recommended for

  • Scientists and engineers who need to visualize data across diverse platforms.
  • Users comfortable working with command-line interfaces.
  • Individuals or teams needing to generate plots through automated scripts.
  • Those looking for a free and open-source alternative to other graphing tools.

GnuPlot videos

Gnuplot Introduction

More videos:

  • Review - DTrace Latency Visualization in gnuplot
  • Review - Basics of Gnuplot - Make your plot look Good

PDFMonkey videos

PDFMonkey - explained

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to GnuPlot and PDFMonkey)
Technical Computing
100 100%
0% 0
PDF Tools
0 0%
100% 100
Numerical Computation
100 100%
0% 0
PDF Conversion API
0 0%
100% 100

Questions & Answers

As answered by people managing GnuPlot and PDFMonkey.

What makes your product unique?

PDFMonkey's answer:

PDFMonkey is a simple PDF generation tool that can make your task easier with automated shipping labels, invoices or any other PDF hassle.

Why should a person choose your product over its competitors?

PDFMonkey's answer:

PDFMonkey is one of the oldest in the market but also one of the best tool giving advanced features and improved support on automation tools such as Zapier, Make and bubble.

User comments

Share your experience with using GnuPlot and PDFMonkey. For example, how are they different and which one is better?
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Reviews

These are some of the external sources and on-site user reviews we've used to compare GnuPlot and PDFMonkey

GnuPlot Reviews

We have no reviews of GnuPlot yet.
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PDFMonkey Reviews

14 Best PDF APIs for Every Business Need
PDFMonkey helps you with automating the process of PDF generation. Using it, you can effortlessly manage your templates and insert dynamic data in them whenever necessary. Thus, it saves precious time for the developers that they would have spent writing codes for PDF.
Source: geekflare.com

Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, GnuPlot should be more popular than PDFMonkey. It has been mentiond 5 times since March 2021. We are tracking product recommendations and mentions on various public social media platforms and blogs. They can help you identify which product is more popular and what people think of it.

GnuPlot mentions (5)

  • Question about Project Management
    To some extent it extends the concept of tasks which only can be reasonably executed after the completion of other ones (though results of branches eventually may join each other) and offers an additional assisting birds' eye visual of projects. So far, I'm aware about the documentation on worg interfacing org-taskjuggler and taskjuggler, as well as a video tutorial interfacing gnuplot instead. Source: about 3 years ago
  • How do I make a transparent background on .ps or .eps file imported to groff
    Gnuplot is a program to plot diagrams. The Commands issued to use it don't change regardless if it is used in Linux/Windows/MacOS and it comes with less dependencies than a Spread sheet, or a statistics program. This is why I started to Become comfortable with it, and venture out some of its features. Here, "conditional plot" referred to "the diagram only displays a Thing/uses a pixel if the value in the table... Source: over 3 years ago
  • Drawing graphs and diagrams
    Or, does drawing diagrams refers to plotting data, but neither using matplotlib, nor gnuplot (export to .svg, .pdf, .png; pstricks, tikz to mention a few options)? Source: over 3 years ago
  • Are specific softwares avialable that are suitable for converting different diagrams, graphs and mindmaps to latex codes?
    There may the occasion you actually need the data from a publication, and want to plot them altogether with data newly collected data in one diagram in common. An overlay, though possible, can become tricky (scaling, centering, alignment, etc.) and plotting all data in a diagram generated from scratch (gnuplot/octave, matplotlib, Origin, ...) exported as an illustration in the usual formats (.pdf/.png), or... Source: over 3 years ago
  • Introducing Graphs
    Have you looked at the graphing capabilities of Octave or Gnuplot? Gnuplot in particular has a lot of options, and a GUI for those who want it. Source: over 3 years ago

PDFMonkey mentions (1)

  • From PDFMonkey to Aim Monkey: Building internal tools that actually help
    One of the first features I worked on when starting my career was AIM's pdf generation tool. It was time to migrate off of PDF monkey's SaaS product to our own solution. We had to figure a way of maintaining the same templates we used with PDF moneky but reverse engineering the server side logic, this was quite the challenge on it's own, we managed to eventually do it but ended up with a extra friction and huge... - Source: dev.to / about 1 year ago

What are some alternatives?

When comparing GnuPlot and PDFMonkey, you can also consider the following products

Matplotlib - matplotlib is a python 2D plotting library which produces publication quality figures in a variety...

APITemplate.io - APITemplate.io allows you to auto-generate social images and PDF documents with a simple API or automation tools like Zapier & Airtable. No CSS/HTML required.

GeoGebra CAS Calculator - Free online algebra calculator from GeoGebra: solve equations, expand and factor expressions, find derivatives and integrals

CraftMyPDF - Auto-generate PDFs with a drag&drop editor and a simple API

GeoGebra - GeoGebra is free and multi-platform dynamic mathematics software for learning and teaching.

DocRaptor - As the only API powered by the Prince HTML-to-PDF engine, DocRaptor provides the best support for complex PDFs with powerful support for headers, page breaks, page numbers, flexbox, watermarks, accessible PDFs, and much more