Plotly : The Online Graphing Analytics Platform

Plotly is an online graphing and analytics platform. It’s a place where you can analyze data, make and share beautiful graphs, and discover content you love. It’s also a community. In this post, we’ll be highlighting a few of our favorite user graphs, and showing some of the key features available in Plotly. We’d love to hear your thoughts, suggestions and feedback. We’re at @plotlygraphs.

First up we’ll show a histogram from Alex Parker. The graph shows the number of Google results for the word “space” with different numbers of a’s. 55 and 96 are popular, with Google showing 2,970 results for space spelled with 96 a’s. If you hover your mouse over a point or click and drag to zoom in, you can learn more.

The next graph was made by Wired Science writer Rhett Allain, and comes from his video analysis of an exploding death star article.

Two fun things to point out here that you can do with Plotly: First, Plotly allows you to easily create fits for your data, as Rhett often does. Check it out below, or head over to our best fits gallery.

<iframe src="https://plot.ly/~etpinard/176/650/550" height="550" width="650" seamless="seamless" frameborder="0" scrolling="no"></iframe>

One reason you might enjoy Plotly: It’s free, online, and doesn’t need to be downloaded or installed. You can also access data you find in other plots by using a tool in WebPlotDigitizer. In this case, we used a tool called WebPlotDigitizer to access the data in a Facebook Data Science post.

The best thing about Plot.ly, is that when someone like Rhett embeds a graph, he gives me an opportunity to connect with him and his work. If I click the “data and graph” link in his posts, I can make my own copy of his graph and view his data. I can also see his profile https://plot.ly/~RhettAllain/. He has all of his graphs there, much like you might keep all your photos on your Instagram profile. That lets you organize your projects and work all in one place where others can connect with you and see all your work and data.

Sharing data and graphs together is a key part of Plotly. When I see a graph, I can also see the data to test it, share it, or re-graph it. You can also fork graphs and add to them, using either an API or by just copy and pasting or uploading data from a csv or Excel file. Here’s how our grid looks:

 

Plotly is also collaborative. Any graph you make you can keep private, or share with others. That means you can do all your data analysis, graphing, and collaboration in one place. No more emailing around files, graphs, screenshots, and presentations. You can do it all in Plotly.

 

Plot.ly – The Free Data Analysis & Graphing Tool