For a data analyst, being aware of different data visualization tools is a must. In this article, we will discuss 15 free data visualization tools that you can try in 2023.

Following are the 15 free data visualization tools for 2023 that we are going to discuss.

• Microsoft PowerBI
• Looker Studio (Formerly Google Data Studio)
• Canva
• Tableau Public
• Flourish Public
• Infogram
• Visme
• DataWrapper
• Matplotlib
• Seaborn
• RShiny
• Leaflet
• Openheatmap
• Chartle
• Visualize Free

Microsoft PowerBI

Microsoft PowerBI is a no-code, free data visualization tool. It is a great tool for visualization as it provides more than 12 types of charts such as heatmaps, scatter plots, bar graphs, tables, etc. PowerBI comes in free as well as paid versions.

In the free version of PowerBI, you can connect to more than 50 data sources, export your visualizations to PowerPoint, excel, csv, and publish the visualizations to the internet too. If you want to get into data analytics, this might be a great tool for you to learn and use. Many organizations use paid versions of Microsoft PowerBI. Hence, if you are skilled at it, you will find it easy to grab a job offer. If you are working as a data analyst, it can still be a good addition to your skill set if you want to switch jobs. 

Looker Studio (Formerly Google Data Studio)

Unlike Microsoft PowerBI, Looker Studio is a completely free tool for data visualization. You can access it using your web browser. Looker Studio provides more than 800 connectors to connect to different data sources such as google analytics, Facebook ads, Amazon Redshift, BigQuery, traditional databases like PostgreSQL, Microsoft SQL Server, MySQL, and much more. 

The key features of Looker studio are

• Easy to Use web-interface: Looker Studio is designed to be intuitive and easy to use. The report editor features simple drag-and-drop objects with fully custom property panels and a snap-to-grid canvas.
• Report templates: With a robust library of report templates to choose from, you can visualize your data in minutes. You can also connect your data sources and customize the design to meet your needs.
• More than 800 data connectors: Data sources act as pipes to connect a Looker Studio report to underlying data. Each source has a unique, prebuilt connector to ensure your data is easy to access and use.
• Looker Studio API: The Looker Studio API allows Google Workspace or Cloud Identity organizations to automate management and migration of Looker Studio assets. You can configure an application to use the Looker Studio API quickly and easily.
• Report embedding: Embedding allows you to include your Looker Studio report in any web page or intranet, making it easier for you to tell your data story to your team or the world.

Apart from basic charts, Looker Studio provides features such as pivot tables, geo-maps, etc. It makes data visualization tasks pretty simple and interesting. It also provides automated dashboards to empower your teams with key business metrics. Given the functionalities, you will find it interesting for sure. Hence, I would suggest you try it once. 

Canva

Who doesn’t use Canva? It is a great tool for creating PowerPoint presentations, photos, posters, and much more. You can also create great visualizations using Canva. It provides more than 20 professional types of graphs to choose from for creating data visualizations. To fast-track your workflow, Canva provides many professionally designed templates. 

If you are working in teams, you can also collaborate with other people while creating visualizations on Canva. It also allows you to download the visualizations or embed it in presentations, reports, and more with no fuss. With easy drag-and-drop features, professional templates, and a great UI, Canva is one of the best free data visualization tools you can try in 2023. 

Tableau Public

Tableau is one of the most popular free data visualization tools right now. With Tableau public, you can create various visualizations and share them with your peers. Tableau also provides Tableau Gallery which is a repository of a wide range of visualizations. You can observe the visualizations and manipulate them to play with. It will help you to understand how to create different types of visualizations in a very easy manner. 

Tableau Public is designed for academicians, data analysts, data scientists, or any person who wants to explore data visualization. With Tableau Public, you can also collaborate with other peers and teammates to create visualizations.  With its unparalleled data visualization functionalities and unmatched graphics, Tableau Public is a must-try for a data analyst or a data scientist for sure.

Tableau public also has a major drawback. You cannot save any data visualizations on your local machine. Everything is saved on your Tableau public profile which is accessible to everyone. Hence, if you are going to work with proprietary or sensitive data, you cannot use Tableau Public. However, for practice and academic purposes, Tableau public can be a great tool.

Flourish Public

Flourish Public is one of the best free data visualization tools when it comes to telling stories with data. It is also a web-based data visualization tool. Instead of traditional visualization elements such as diagrams and dashboards, Flourish focuses more on visualization through immersive storytelling. It provides you with a wide range of templates for creating visualizations from data. 

If you want to focus more on visualization elements such as figuration and decoration, Flourish might be a great data visualization tool for you. For instance, if you are someone who creates visualizations to guide the viewers through one or more data visualizations to present a story or create a narrative, Flourish is the most suitable data visualization tool for you.

Suggested Reading: Data Visualization Wheel by Alberto Cairo

Although it is very easy to create decorative visualizations with Flourish, it doesn’t support adding data from online tools such as Google sheets.

Infogram

Infogram is also a web-based data visualization tool. It offers different functionalities such as interactive charts, info graphics, maps, etc which make the visualization task easier. It also allows you to zoom, rotate, fade, slide, and bounce visualization elements into your graphics for better results.  You can also import data into Infogram from Dropbox, MySQL, google sheets, direct JSON data feeds using APIs and others.

Apart from data visualization, you can also use Infogram for creating reports, slides, email headers, and social media content. 

If you are someone who aims to stand out from the crowd with the help of data-driven stories, you can try Infogram. 

In the free version, If you want to export a visualization having interactive charts, a large Infogram logo is added to the chart. However, it is still useful for simple data visualization tasks. 

Visme

Visme is a free data visualization tool. It is a fully customizable chart visualization tool having a number of different chart types. You can create custom visualizations online with Visme’s free and easy-to-use chart templates. Whether you need a radar chart or a comparison chart, you can just drag and drop every chat type into your visualization. 

To start with, you can use Visme’s premade infographics or presentation templates to showcase your chart. 

With easy drag-and-drop design tools, Visme also provides a dozen different chart types, customizable colors, and labels. To share the visualizations, you can also embed an interactive chart on your website or save it as an image file and share it. So, Visme seems a great contender for a free data visualization tool that you can try in 2023.

DataWrapper

DataWrapper also comes as a web app for data visualization. With DataWrapper, you can easily import data from CSV files, pdfs, and links to the datasets and create visualizations from the data. The best part is that DataWrapper doesn’t even require you to sign up. 

The key features of DataWrapper Include:

• Unlimited Visualizations: Even on the free plan, there’s no limit to the number of charts, maps, and tables you can create in DataWrapper.
• Private Charts: No matter which plan you choose, all your visualizations and data are private until you publish them explicitly.
• Exporting Charts: You can export every visualization as PNG, SVG, or PDF. For instance, you can export an incomplete chart from DataWrapper and complete it in an another app like Adobe illustrator.
• Scalability: DataWrapper visualizations scale to the largest audiences and support even millions of viewers.
• Live Updating: All visualizations at DataWrapper can be update periodically in an automatic manner based on an underlying data. For this, you just need to link to an external CSV or Google Sheet where data is stored.
• Collaboration: At DataWrapper, you can make use of shared folders, Slack and Teams integration, and admin permissions to see what your team is creating and collaborate with each other.
• Customized design: If you want to create custom chart themes, you can Send your style guide to DataWrapper and they will create a custom chart theme for your brand which is 100% white-labeled.

DataWrapper also allows you to share visualizations with other users using its platform named “River”. You can also choose visualizations from River and reuse them for your dataset. If your data source includes different files like CSV, PDF, or even online databases and you want to compile the data from each source and create visualizations, DataWrapper can be of great use to you. It is beginner friendly and guides you through the entire process to create visualizations from a given data. 

Matplotlib

Python provides us with many libraries for different types of tasks. If you are the one who knows how to code in Python, you can use python libraries such as Matplotlib and Seaborn to analyze data and create visualizations. 

Matplotlib is a great tool for data visualization in python. From the matplotlib library, you can use the Plotly module to plot high-quality charts and other visualizations from any given data. If you want to compare different metrics, you can also create multiple plots in a single visualization using matplotlib.

Matplotlib library can also be combined with other data visualization libraries such as ggplot, seaborn, and basemap to create different types of visualizations. If you know python, I suggest you use this free and open-source tool for data visualization for sure.

Seaborn

The Seaborn library has been built on top of the matplotlib library. In addition to the tools in matplotlib, Seaborn provides a high-level interface that enables you to create attractive and informative visualizations. Just like Matplotlib, Seaborn is also an open-source data visualization tool in python.

Seaborn defines itself as a statistical data visualization tool. It means that seaborn has many features to support statistical modeling and data visualization. With Seaborn, you can use statistical methods and machine learning algorithms on the dataset and plot the outputs very easily.  So, if you are looking for a data visualization tool that also performs statistical analysis and data analysis, you should try Seaborn for sure.

RShiny

For statistical data analysis, the R programming language is a great alternative to Python. You can use the Shiny module in R, popularly known as RShiny for creative visualizations from a given data. You can also use it to create interactive visualizations by hosting it on standalone websites or embedding the visualizations into larger dashboards.

RShiny is designed as a data visualization tool for people who don’t know R programming. So, even if you know very little about the syntax of the R programming language, you can easily pick up concepts of RShiny. RStudio also provides step-by-step tutorials that introduce the readers to all the features and process flow in RShiny.

Leaflet

Leaflet isn’t really a data visualization tool. It is a javascript library for creating data visualization frameworks and APIs. If you want to create your own data visualization framework for displaying visualizations on websites and mobile applications

Openheatmap

Openheatmap is a great tool to analyze geographical data. You can convert any data stored in spreadsheets to an informative visualization in a single click.

Chartle

Chartle is a minimal, free web-based data visualization tool where you can create and make your own charts and graphs. We support line charts, bar graphs, bubble charts, pie, and donut charts as well as scatter, radar, and polar graphs and charts. You can select a chart type and enter data for your chart and the chart will be created instantly. You can also set all kinds of properties like colors, labels, grids, legends, and titles in your charts. You can also annotate your chart with text and shapes. The result can be saved for later editing or can be saved as an image or shared online.

Visualize Free

Visualize Free is yet another cloud-hosted, zero-client tools for data visualization and analytics. To create visualizations using Visualize Free, you can simply upload your spreadsheet data and drag-and-drop to create visualization dashboards with built-in interactivity. If you want to share your charts, you can also do so using a generated shareable link.

Conclusion

In this article, we have discussed 15 free data visualization tools that you can try in 2023. To learn more about data visualization, you can read this article on how to avoid chart junk in your charts. You might also like this article on data ink ratio.

Disclosure of Material Connection: Some of the links in the post above are “affiliate links.” This means if you click on the link and purchase the item, I will receive an affiliate commission. Regardless, I only recommend products or services I use personally and believe will add value to my readers.