Visualising Data with Open Source Tools

Open source offers a varied range of tools to help interpret data better by visualising it. These tools offer customisation, cost-effectiveness, and community-backed development.

- 

Data visualisation skills matter more than ever in a world where data generation has exploded and decision-makers require fast yet informed choices.

A properly designed bar chart delivers information that far exceeds what 100 rows of Excel data can communicate.

Enterprise-grade data visualisation tools no longer require expensive investments. The open source movement has led to the creation of accessible and powerful tools based on community-driven development.

What makes open source stand out is:

• You're not locked into a vendor’s roadmap.

• The software provides users with complete flexibility to customise their tools according to their needs.

• The software requires no payment from users regardless of their project size.

Thousands of contributors in the open source community continually work to enhance a platform’s features.

Open source technology creates equal opportunities for startup data analysts and university researchers who work independently. The tools offer users flexible APIs combined with robust visualisation libraries and expanding ecosystems to create better data stories without requiring expensive investments.

Tools of the trade

Here are the best open source tools that are shaping the future of data visualisation and storytelling— from notebooks to dashboards, and everything in between.

Jupyter Notebooks: Still the data scientist's best friend

Today, Jupyter Notebooks is the leading development environment for data science. Within a web browser, users can record live coding, visualisations, and narrative text and equations in one document. This flexible format is useful for either collaborative and reproducible analysis working with data exploration or for data communication.