I just happened to be scouring around for a good JS charting library yesterday.

Does anyone here have any experience with one? I am trying to build a dashboard, much like http://www.geckoboard.com/ and I need to be able to display nice charts (all kinds - bar, stacked, pie) with real-time data.

I looked some into flot (http://code.google.com/p/flot/) which uses the canvas, and Raphael (http://raphaeljs.com/) which uses SVG (and is not really a charting library) but they have gRaphael for that purpose. But with the plethora of options out there, I figured I ought to ask here at HN.

Any suggestions, anyone?

Graphing is central to our product. Right now we're using Flot. It's a great library for the price (free), but we're looking for more (specifically the live charts animation features). After a lot of looking, we've settled on Highcharts. We decided on Highcharts for the following reasons:

* Uses native code (no plug-ins) in a wide variety of browsers (even IE6) * Supports a wide variety of charts, including candlestick, which is important for finance charts (our product is in the "finance" vertical) * Works with jQuery, which is the JS library we use * Documentation has a fantastic introduction; from there it's just a matter of picking a chart and reviewing the API ref * Active support forum * Reasonable pricing

If you're looking at Flot, and want to take your charts a little further, I think Highcharts is a great choice. If you're looking to do something more abstract, it may not fit the confines of your standard bar, stack, line, etc chart. In these cases, you should look at one of the visualization libraries. Highcharts is the kind of library that is ready to take a data set and render a graph in just a few lines of code.

EDIT: It's worth noting that Flot will work with IE when combined with the excanvas project. So far we've done a TON with Flot and been very happy for a free product.

You can check out Highcharts (which is mentioned in the article)

http://www.highcharts.com/

take a look at the chart demos here: http://www.highcharts.com/demo/?example=combo&theme=defa...

You can also take a look at:

http://www.fusioncharts.com/ and http://www.amcharts.com

Raphaeljs also has chart libraries. http://g.raphaeljs.com/ They're not perfect, but I think there's supposed to be an update soon.

Highchart and others charting options are non-starters for me at this moment. Don't want to pay $300+ right now.

I've been playing around with Protovis and like it. It takes a bit of time to understand how it works but once everything clicks you end up being very productive.

No Flot? You fail.