Flourish vs Understand

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.

Understand turns static charts and complex dashboards into data stories for sharing insights and supporting decisions. Each story is built from cards that appear as viewers scroll through it, a format the product calls scrollytelling. Users can import data from files, Google, SQL databases, OLAP cubes, or APIs. Understand AI can analyze and summarize stories and identify anomalies. Stories can be shared publicly or embedded; Growth also supports email and Slack notifications. The service describes scheduled story updates and mobile-friendly viewing. A white-label option lets users embed stories in another product with custom branding and a custom domain. Enterprise-ready options include private cloud or single-tenant deployment, SSO, and access control. The free Starter plan includes one editor, unlimited stories, CSV upload and manual entry, public sharing, and scrollytelling. Growth costs $25.00 per editor per month with annual billing. A 14-day trial is listed, and the terms limit website use to individuals aged 13 or older.