comparison of flot versus google charts

I am starting up a website that needs a lot of s开发者_高级运维ophisticated multi line charts. I see two top candidates for the job

1. Flot
2. Google Charts

Does anyone have any recommendations or preferences on this decision?

• Google charts: You will need to call out to google every time you need to plot. Is it acceptable to do this from your website?

• Control: Flot is the clear winner in this category, as you have a very high degree of control over plots. Also, Flot is pretty fast! I have used it personally, and once you get the hang of the API, it is great. Further, there are many 'plugins' that can be written (and some are available) for flot. I think this is a great feature.

Overall, I would vote for Flot.

• Edit: Also look at http://www.highcharts.com/, a great charting library (if you can figure out the licensing).

There are lots of nice plugins for features like radar graphs (spider graphs), Gantt charts, cluster graphs, 3D effects, gradients effects and lots more in Flot. Flot is also open source and under the MIT license, which gives you complete freedom in using it (even commercially) without having to apply a similar license.

What if Google discontinues their chart service? In case you were wondering, they are well within their rights to do so, and in a few months' notice at that: https://developers.google.com/chart/terms.

Plus, client-side charts will naturally be far better for dynamic charts, which is essentially the standard these days.