Flourish vs Plotly

Flourish is a no-code tool for creating interactive data visualizations and stories, including charts and maps. Its library has more than 50 chart types and templates, such as line and bar charts, interactive maps, hierarchy graphs, survey results, and Sankey diagrams. Templates can include tooltips, filters, and animations; Publisher and Enterprise plans add scrollytelling. Published projects can be embedded in websites with responsive code or shared using a unique URL. Flourish can refresh visualizations from publicly accessible CSV files at intervals, while Publisher includes live updates from Google Sheets or CSV. Presenter, available with Canva Business or Enterprise, supports interactive charts in Canva designs and PowerPoint. Enterprise offers an API for creating and editing visualizations and connecting them to databases, live data feeds, webpages, and tools including R, Tableau, Jupyter, and Observable. Presenter, Publisher, and Enterprise offer PNG, JPEG, and usually SVG export; Publisher also includes HTML export for self-hosting. The Free plan costs nothing, allows unlimited projects, and adds Flourish attribution to published visualizations.

Plotly provides tools for interactive dashboards, data applications, and charts, spanning open-source libraries, hosted services, and self-hosted platforms. Its graphing libraries support Python and JavaScript and offer more than 70 chart types. Dashboards support scheduled refresh and embedding, with connections to Snowflake, Databricks, BigQuery, PostgreSQL, MySQL, SQL Server, MotherDuck, Oracle, CSV, and sources accessible through Python. Plotly Studio runs locally as a desktop app and can deploy to Plotly Cloud; Dash Enterprise can be self-hosted or run on premises. The Free plan includes one creator seat, one Dash or Plotly Studio app, three private viewers, and 10 trial credits, with no credit card required. It does not permit inviting other Creators or Viewers. Pro is $29 a month per Creator seat, with 30 monthly credits, 10 private viewers, and unlimited apps. Credit-powered features stop when credits run out, but published apps continue running. Subscriptions can be canceled without fees or penalties.