Flourish

Flourish is a browser-based tool for interactive and animated charts, built on templates. You pick a template (line chart, bar chart race, scatter plot, map, network graph, survey chart and many more), paste or upload data, map columns to the parts of the chart, and adjust settings. Charts can be embedded on web pages or combined into "stories," a slide-like sequence where the chart changes from step to step. It is part of Canva.

Flourish is at its best when the chart needs to move or be explored: a ranking that changes over time, a map with a time slider, a step-by-step explanation.

Who it suits

Flourish suits newsrooms, communications teams, teachers and anyone presenting data to a general audience on the web. It suits people who want animation and interaction without writing JavaScript. Social media teams use it for short animated charts that get recorded as video.

It suits analysts less. Flourish does no real analysis; it visualizes a table you have already prepared.

What it does well

The template range is the main draw. Beyond the standard chart types, Flourish has templates that are hard to build anywhere else without code: bar chart races, animated scatter plots in the style of Hans Rosling's talks, network graphs, hierarchy charts, Sankey-style flows, 3D globes and interactive survey visualizations.

Other strengths:

• Stories: a sequence of slides built from your visualizations, with smooth animated transitions between states. Good for walking a reader through a data story step by step.
• Controls: filters, dropdowns and time sliders that let readers choose what they see.
• Responsive embeds that work on phones.
• Live data: a chart can pull from a published Google Sheet, and the data can be updated without rebuilding the chart.

Where it gets in the way

Each template has many settings, spread over long panels. Getting a chart from "template default" to "clean and publishable" often takes longer than in Datawrapper, whose defaults need less fixing. Some templates come with legends, gridlines and colors that you will want to remove or change.

Animation is easy to overuse. A bar chart race is fun once; as the standard way to show a ranking, it makes readers wait for information a sorted bar chart or a line chart would give them at once. Use motion when the change over time is the story.

Data shape matters. Each template expects a particular layout, for example one column per year for a bar chart race, so you often need to reshape your data before importing it.

Free options

The free plan gives access to the template library and lets you make visualizations and stories. Your work is private while you build it, but publishing on the free plan makes it public: published projects appear on public pages that search engines can index, carry Flourish attribution, and can be duplicated by others by default. Don't use the free plan for confidential or unpublished data.

Paid plans add private and password-protected publishing, removal of the attribution, custom branding, and export options such as image and HTML downloads.

How it compares

Against Datawrapper: both make charts for the web from a browser. Datawrapper is faster for standard charts, maps and tables with strong defaults. Flourish offers more chart types, animation and story formats, with more setup. Use Datawrapper for the daily chart and Flourish when you need motion or an unusual template.

Against D3.js: D3 can build anything Flourish can and more, but you write it in JavaScript. Flourish gives you a large set of tested templates without code. If a template does what you need, it will be ready in an hour, where a D3 build would take days.

A good first project

Find a ranking that changes over time: the top ten countries by medal count across Olympics, the most-streamed artists by month, or your own website's top pages by week. Build it as a line chart in Flourish first, then as a bar chart race, and compare. Notice which one answers "who led when?" faster and which one holds attention better.

Then build a three-slide story: the whole picture, a zoom on one interesting period, and a final slide that highlights the one line the story is about. That structure works for most data stories, in any tool.