Fusion Charts or Chart.js for Laravel development

My experience working with Fusion Charts and Chart.js in laravel analytics applications.

Look

Both options have a relatively well worn path for customising elements. This is a really important factor, because any modern web application can be let down by charting objects that look dated. I would argue that both chart.js and fusion charts look quite old-fashioned out of the box. That being said, both have customisation options to get them looking more in line with the overall look and feel of your brand. For example, I like the font to either match or compliment that in use on the site, and I like to set the font weighting to light, with a dark grey set to 80% opacity. If you haven’t tried that yet, give it a go. It can create charting objects that improve the overall look and feel of your chart by 1000% (not really, but it is a real improvement)

Support

Fusion Charts are a private company, which means that in theory they should have a support team on hand to help with queries. I have to say, I emailed the company with an issue gaining access to the support forum, and I have yet to receive a response. I also raised a sales query, which I did get a response, though it did take longer than I would’ve liked to get a response. I am not a Fusion charts customer, therefore I cannot comment on their premium support.

Price

If price is a factor, then you should consider that chart.js is an open source project, whereas fusion charts is ran by a private company. A single developer license with Fusion Charts will only run you $200 a year. The developer license is limited though — if you have any kind of paid membership system in place, then the developer license does not apply, and you will instead need to make use of the SAAS (software as a service) license. The product is also split into a number of different licenses, so the tree-map chart is not covered by the same license as the bar and line charts, which means that two licenses are required. This hiked the price considerably. Still cheaper than many competitors, and had I seen the benefit of the tree-map chart (not provided by chart.js) I may have been swayed in that direction.

Development time

I would say that I certainly spent less time developing a chart with Fusion Charts then I did with chart.js. Though, being completely honest, the mechanisms for generating analytic objects, such as bar and line graphs, is pretty standard across the charting libraries. Personally, I quite liked the PHP wrapper that fusion charts provide. The wrapper was enough for me to initially work with fusion charts, though a PHP wrapper is possibly a bit of a crutch. Any charting library is a front end one, so embrace that and burn the wrapper!

Can you trust the developer to not hike the prices?

This is a really big issue for me. Price hikes can kill a project.

I have previously built a project using the Microsoft Power BI tool set. I fell in love with Power BI for a number of reasons — the engine was a tabular data model, that could be queried using DAX. I could also stick an analysis services model behind it. This meant that I could analyse hundreds of thousands of records, with split second filtering. It was also possible to apply ‘cross-filtering’, which is where making a selection on one chart applies that as a filter to another (this is possible in both Fusion Charts and Chart.js also)

It was a marriage made in heaven, and was by far one of the smoothest development processes I’ve had in developing an analytics solution. Unfortunately, what was a beautiful engagement ended in separation. Things were said, they got the T.V, I got the dog. Microsoft increased the costs exponentially, by adding the developer tools to the ‘Premium’ tier. The lowest priced tier was $700 per month, annualised at $8,400, which is simply not sustainable for a bootstrapped company.

Therefore, I am reluctant to work with a private company again. For an analytics application, the charting library is a massive part of your work, and being forced to effectively redevelop the entire application is an expensive process. By using open source libraries, I think that the chances of having to re-engineer the entire project due to price hikes is far smaller.

Fusion Charts was far cheaper than Microsoft, though that was using a ‘startup’ rate. Who knows if those prices would stay the same in twelve months time.

Conclusion

I choose to work with chart.js with my projects. Basically I like the fact that it is open source, with a strong community that provide support and assistance along the way. I will need to use another library if I want to make use of maps and tree-maps, though this is a trade off that I am comfortable with. Google charts for example provide a tree-map chart that is free, and is configured in much the same way that chart.js is. I must say though, I think Fusion Charts is a good product, and is fairly priced. Having had the experience of using a third party provider before though, open source feels like a much safer option… I’d love to get your thoughts. Do you use Fusion Charts or chart.js with your Laravel projects.