Pie chart with jQuery
jqPlot looks pretty good and it is open source.
Here's a link to the most impressive and up-to-date jqPlot examples.
Flot
Limitations: lines, points, filled areas, bars, pie and combinations of these
From an interaction perspective, Flot by far will get you as close as possible to Flash graphing as you can get with jQuery. Whilst the graph output is pretty slick, and great looking, you can also interact with data points. What I mean by this is you can have the ability to hover over a data point and get visual feedback on the value of that point in the graph.
The trunk version of flot supports pie charts.
Flot Zoom capability.
On top of this, you also have the ability to select a chunk of the graph to get data back for a particular “zone”. As a secondary feature to this “zoning”, you can also select an area on a graph and zoom in to see the data points a little more closely. Very cool.
Sparklines
Limitations: Pie, Line, Bar, Combination
Sparklines is my favourite mini graphing tool out there. Really great for dashboard style graphs (think Google Analytics dashboard next time you login). Because they’re so tiny, they can be included in line (as in the example above). Another nice idea which can be used in all graphing plugins is the self-refresh capabilities. Their Mouse-Speed demo shows you the power of live charting at its best.
Query Chart 0.21
Limitations: Area, Line, Bar and combinations of these
jQuery Chart 0.21 isn’t the nicest looking charting plugin out there it has to be said. It’s pretty basic in functionality when it comes to the charts it can handle, however it can be flexible if you can put in some time and effort into it.
Adding values into a chart is relatively simple:
.chartAdd({
"label" : "Leads",
"type" : "Line",
"color" : "#008800",
"values" : ["100","124","222","44","123","23","99"]
});
jQchart
Limitations: Bar, Line
jQchart is an odd one, they’ve built in animation transistions and drag/drop functionality into the chart, however it’s a little clunky – and seemingly pointless. It does generate nice looking charts if you get the CSS setup right, but there are better out there.
TufteGraph
Limitations: Bar and Stacked Bar
Tuftegraph sells itself as “pretty bar graphs that you would show your mother”. It comes close, Flot is prettier, but Tufte does lend itself to be very lightweight. Although with that comes restrictions – there are few options to choose from, so you get what you’re given. Check it out for a quick win bar chart.