Charting Its Course To Success is Bangalore Based CanvasJS

How do you display statistical charts and graphs? You’d either use a statistics tool, such as SPSS or Excel and the program would generate these for you, depending on the data that you input. Now what if your input data is on the web? There is no way to get these tools to render graphs and charts on the web (technically, you could publish an image of the graph on the web, but it won’t be dynamic). You need a charts library.

Web tools, such as Fusioncharts and other flash and HTML5 based tools are used to render beautiful graphs and charts for data entered into the web. SVG (scalable vector graphics), another alternative for graphical representation on the web, is also widely used for producing graphs with high resolution.

However, the existing solutions have 2 barriers -

• It is difficult to find good talent that can work on flash and SVG applications, as coding on these platforms isn’t easy
• Flash and SVG doesn’t render on all devices. With a growing number of mobile devices, which don’t support flash and SVG, this is a concern.

Addressing these two problems is CanvasJS, a data visualization tool that uses HTML5 and Javascript. CanvasJS comes from the stable of Bangalore based Fenopix, who also made HashPlug and Hire US. By using HTML5 & Javascript, charts and graphs made using CanvasJS will render across most internet enabled devices. Coding on HTML5 and JS is a given across most developers, hence solving the talent problem also. Founder Sunil Urs claims that besides providing beautiful themes, CanvasJS also runs 10x faster than conventional Flash and SVG Charts. Try the demo here and see for yourself.

Average Designs

When compared to Fusioncharts, the graphs and charts made by CanvasJS isn’t as good looking. This shouldn’t be a problem as CanvasJS is in its early stages and a good designer can do the trick.

Pricing

While Fusioncharts has a whole host of products to sell at $3299, it only allows usage within the organization and not for commercial use. CanvasJS at $2999 maybe a tad expensive. for multiple users, for any kind of use, is much cheaper. Furthermore, Fusioncharts charges a small cost for an individual developer license, CanvasJS keeps it free.

Market and competition

The market for these tools is the enterprise sector. From what we found from talking around, we found that startups and individual developers find the price points for the commercial license to be high. But its not the individual developers that CanvasJS is marketing to, it companies who do analytics as well as companies who build analytic dashboard for internal use that are the potential customers, says Sunil.

On competition, Sunil says, “Other than Fusioncharts, there’s one other company, High Charts based in Norway who do what we’re doing.”

Try out CanvasJS and tell us what you think