Software Alternatives, Accelerators & Startups

Highcharts VS GnuPlot

Compare Highcharts VS GnuPlot and see what are their differences

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

GnuPlot logo GnuPlot

Gnuplot is a portable command-line driven interactive data and function plotting utility.
  • Highcharts Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-03-16
  • GnuPlot Landing page
    Landing page //
    2022-12-13

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.

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).

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

GnuPlot videos

Gnuplot Introduction

More videos:

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

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Highcharts and GnuPlot)
Data Dashboard
100 100%
0% 0
Technical Computing
0 0%
100% 100
Data Visualization
83 83%
17% 17
Numerical Computation
0 0%
100% 100

User comments

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Reviews

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

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

GnuPlot Reviews

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

Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, GnuPlot 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.

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 2 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: about 2 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: about 2 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 2 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 2 years ago

What are some alternatives?

When comparing Highcharts and GnuPlot, 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.

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

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

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

Google Charts - Interactive charts for browsers and mobile devices.

SciDaVis - SciDAVis is a free application for Scientific Data Analysis and Visualization.