Software Alternatives & Startups

Highcharts VS DocSpring

Compare Highcharts VS DocSpring 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.

Highcharts logo Highcharts

A charting library written in pure JavaScript, offering an easy way of adding interactive charts to your web site or web application

DocSpring logo DocSpring

PDF filling API that makes it easy to fill out PDF forms and convert HTML to PDFs
  • Highcharts Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-03-16
  • DocSpring PDF Template Editor
    PDF Template Editor //
    2025-02-26
  • DocSpring HTML Template Preview
    HTML Template Preview //
    2025-02-26
  • DocSpring HTML Template Editor
    HTML Template Editor //
    2025-02-26
  • DocSpring Auto-generated Web Form
    Auto-generated Web Form //
    2025-02-26
  • DocSpring E-Signatures
    E-Signatures //
    2025-02-26
  • DocSpring View Submissions
    View Submissions //
    2025-02-26
  • DocSpring View API Request Logs
    View API Request Logs //
    2025-02-26
  • DocSpring Postman Collection
    Postman Collection //
    2025-02-26

We provide a PDF filling and generation API:

  • Upload your PDF to our visual template editor to set up form fields and data types
  • Post JSON to fill out existing PDF forms with data
  • Generate editable PDF forms, or overlay static data on top of fields
  • Create HTML/CSS templates with Liquid fields, then post JSON to generate PDFs
  • Use our merge API to combine multiple PDFs into a single document

PDF generation doesn't need to be complicated or take weeks of engineering time. Use our battle-tested service to start filling out PDFs in minutes.

DocSpring

$ Details
freemium $49 / Monthly (Starter - 50 PDFs / mo)
Release Date
2017 October
Startup details
Country
United States
State
Delaware
City
Newark
Founder(s)
Nathan Broadbent
Employees
1 - 9

Highcharts features and specs

  • Customization
    Highcharts provides extensive options to customize chart appearance and functionality, allowing for a tailored and specific data visualization experience.
  • Cross-Browser Compatibility
    Highcharts ensures compatibility across a wide range of browsers, making charts accessible to users regardless of their browser preferences.
  • Wide Range of Chart Types
    Offers a broad spectrum of chart types, including line, bar, pie, scatter, and more, catering to various data visualization needs.
  • Interactive Features
    Includes numerous interactive features such as tooltips, zooming, and clickable points, enhancing user engagement with the data.
  • Strong Community and Support
    Has an active community and provides extensive documentation, forums, and professional support options to assist users in overcoming challenges.
  • Performance
    Optimized for high performance, allowing for the rendering of large datasets without significant lag or performance issues.
  • Exporting and Sharing
    Built-in options for exporting charts to various formats (PNG, JPEG, PDF, etc.) and sharing them easily.

Possible disadvantages of Highcharts

  • Cost
    Highcharts is not free for commercial use, which may be a drawback for small businesses or individual developers with limited budgets.
  • Steep Learning Curve
    Despite comprehensive documentation, the abundance of features and customization options can result in a steeper learning curve for new users.
  • Dependency on JavaScript
    As a JavaScript library, Highcharts requires a solid understanding of JavaScript, making it less accessible for developers not familiar with the language.
  • Limited Free Support
    While there is a free support forum, professional support options are paid, which can be a limitation for users needing urgent assistance without extra costs.
  • Mobile Responsiveness
    Although Highcharts provides some support for mobile responsiveness, achieving optimal performance and displays on all device types may require additional customization.

DocSpring features and specs

  • Automated PDF Generation
    DocSpring allows users to automate the generation of PDFs by filling out templates with data. This can significantly reduce the time and effort needed to create documents.
  • API Integration
    DocSpring offers a robust API, which allows developers to integrate PDF generation into their own applications easily, enhancing productivity and workflow automation.
  • Flexible Templates
    The platform supports flexible and customizable templates, enabling businesses to maintain brand consistency while meeting specific document formatting requirements.
  • Secure Data Handling
    DocSpring is SOC 2 Type II compliant. We ensure data security through encryption and secure storage options, making it suitable for handling sensitive information.
  • Ease of Use
    The user interface is designed to be intuitive, making it easy for businesses to create and manage PDF templates without requiring extensive technical knowledge.

Analysis of Highcharts

Overall verdict

  • Highcharts is a strong choice for those seeking a robust and feature-rich charting library. Its popularity among developers and businesses stems from its reliability and comprehensive feature set.

Why this product is good

  • Highcharts is considered good because it offers a wide range of chart types and is highly customizable. It is known for its detailed documentation, ease of use, and cross-platform compatibility. Additionally, Highcharts provides extensive support and a variety of integrations with popular frameworks, making it a versatile choice for developers.

Recommended for

  • Developers looking for a user-friendly and customizable charting library.
  • Projects that require extensive interactive data visualizations.
  • Businesses that need a reliable and professionally supported charting solution.
  • Teams using web technologies and frameworks like Angular, React, or Vue for front-end development.

Highcharts videos

Angular 2 & HighCharts Quick-Tip: Dynamic Data & Draggable Points (2016)

More videos:

  • Tutorial - How to define the custom colors for Highcharts?
  • Review - Data Visualization HighCharts

DocSpring videos

No DocSpring videos yet. You could help us improve this page by suggesting one.

Add video

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Highcharts and DocSpring)
Data Dashboard
100 100%
0% 0
PDF Tools
0 0%
100% 100
Charting Libraries
100 100%
0% 0
Document Automation
0 0%
100% 100

Questions & Answers

As answered by people managing Highcharts and DocSpring.

Which are the primary technologies used for building your product?

DocSpring's answer:

Ruby on Rails, React, AWS

What makes your product unique?

DocSpring's answer:

DocSpring is built specifically for developers who need reliable, secure PDF generation in production. We combine PDF form filling and HTML-to-PDF in a single API, with a visual template editor, typed fields, and validation to catch issues early. Our product has a lot of power features and is built to handle very advanced forms. Our infrastructure is SOC 2 Type II compliant, battle-tested, privacy focused, and optimized for high-volume workloads, so you can ship PDF features quickly and then stop thinking about them.

Why should a person choose your product over its competitors?

DocSpring's answer:

DocSpring is designed for teams who need a powerful tool with all the features you need for complex forms and business logic. DocSpring supports structured JSON, typed fields, and array iterations, and many other advanced features, so your templates stay aligned with your real data model. You get powerful validation, a visual editor, strong observability, and an API that fits into modern engineering workflows, so you spend less time fighting PDFs and more time shipping product.

How would you describe the primary audience of your product?

DocSpring's answer:

DocSpring is built for engineering and product teams who manage complex documents in production: things like financial applications, insurance forms, healthcare and legal documents, HR and payroll workflows, and government-style forms.

What's the story behind your product?

DocSpring's answer:

I used to work at a payroll company (Gusto). We had built a similar in-house tool for filling out tax forms. I then built the first version of DocSpring (formerly named FormAPI) while I was living in Thailand. I built it to automate the filling out of visa application and visa extension forms, but realized that it could also be used for tax forms, real estate contracts, and any other kind of fillable PDF form.

Who are some of the biggest customers of your product?

DocSpring's answer:

  • SaaS services serving customers in the real estate, insurance, finance, and legal industries, among many others.

User comments

Share your experience with using Highcharts and DocSpring. 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 Highcharts and DocSpring

Highcharts Reviews

6 JavaScript Charting Libraries for Powerful Data Visualizations in 2023
However, you might need to pay for additional packages to get exactly what you’re looking for. The Highcharts Core package includes all the essentials (like line, bar, area, and pie charts) but Maps, Gantt, and Stock chart packages are all extra. In terms of cost, this makes Highcharts somewhat less scalable, depending on the budget available for your project.
Source: embeddable.com
15 JavaScript Libraries for Creating Beautiful Charts
Highcharts is another very popular library for building graphs. It comes loaded with many different types of cool animations that are sufficient to attract many eyeballs to your website. Just like other libraries, Highcharts comes with many pre-built graphs like spline, area, areaspline, column, bar, pie, scatter, etc. The charts are responsive and mobile-ready. Besides,...
Best Data Visualization Tools
For companies that want to embed interactive visualizations in their online content, look no further than Datawrapper. Highcharts is another great option for embedding interactive content into your sites, though it’s not as easy for non-specialists as Datawrapper.
Source: neilpatel.com
Top 10 JavaScript Charting Libraries for Every Data Visualization Need
Highcharts is one of the most comprehensive and popular JavaScript charting libraries based on HTML5, rendering in SVG/VML. It is lightweight, supports a wide range of diverse chart types, and ensures high performance.
Source: hackernoon.com
The Best Data Visualization Tools - Top 30 BI Software
Highcharts is a battle-tested SVG-based, multi-platform charting library that has been actively developed since 2009. Its JavaScript API integrates easily, and features robust documentation, advanced responsiveness and industry-leading accessibility support. You can add interactive, mobile-optimized charts to your web and mobile projects. Charts are rendered in SVG and a VML...
Source: improvado.io

DocSpring Reviews

We have no reviews of DocSpring yet.
Be the first one to post

Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, DocSpring seems to be more popular. 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.

Highcharts mentions (0)

We have not tracked any mentions of Highcharts yet. Tracking of Highcharts recommendations started around Mar 2021.

DocSpring mentions (5)

  • Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (February 2025)
    I'm still working on DocSpring [1], originally launched on Hacker News in October 2017 under the name "FormAPI." It's a PDF generation API with a template editor UI for setting up fields on PDF forms. It makes it easy to turn complex tax and immigration forms into simple type-safe APIs with strong validations. I've been having a lot of fun with AI agents lately. Have tried a lot of them - Cline, Roo Code,... - Source: Hacker News / over 1 year ago
  • Launch HN: Onedoc (YC W24) – A better way to create PDFs
    For programmatic filling of PDFs, have a look at DocSpring: https://docspring.com. - Source: Hacker News / over 2 years ago
  • So you want to modify the text of a PDF by hand
    Great post. I've spend a lot of time reading through the PDF specification over the last ~5 years while building DocSpring [1], and I still feel like I've barely scratched the surface. Qpdf is a great tool. One of my other favorites is RUPS [2], which really lets you dig into the structure of a PDF. [1] https://docspring.com [2] https://github.com/itext/i7j-rups. - Source: Hacker News / about 3 years ago
  • Workflow for automating document creation from a "database"
    Hi /u/pepeday, I’m the founder of a software product that I built to solve this problem. The service is called DocSpring: https://docspring.com We provide a platform that you can use to set up PDF templates, and automatically generate PDFs by filling in those templates with data from your database. Please feel free to send me a message and I’d be happy to speak with you and help you figure out a solution. I can... Source: almost 5 years ago
  • How do you fill copies of the same PDF certificates with Excel data?
    - https://docspring.com/ (super advanced features, a bit bloated). Source: about 5 years ago

What are some alternatives?

When comparing Highcharts and DocSpring, you can also consider the following products

D3.js - D3.js is a JavaScript library for manipulating documents based on data. D3 helps you bring data to life using HTML, SVG, and CSS.

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

Chart.js - Easy, object oriented client side graphs for designers and developers.

Doczilla - Effortlessly create stunning PDFs and screenshots. Seamlessly store them in your own AWS or Google Cloud Storage bucket, putting the control and creativity right at your fingertips.

Google Charts - Interactive charts for browsers and mobile devices.

wkhtmltopdf - wkhtmltopdf is an open source (LGPL) command line tools to render HTML into PDF and various image...