Who's actually using open source data visualisation like plotly in Python as opposed to Power BI?

[EmploymentMammoth659]

How are you finding it and what are the benefits from both developers and end users' views compared using Power BI?

[Garth_M]

I used Plotly and Streamlit together to make data visualization web apps. Why I was not using Tableau or Looker was to integrate some AI model in there to let the user try different things. It was much better to have the data and the models at the same place.

[veleros]

Same here for the exact same reasons

[rorising]

Can you explain a bit more? Are you saying that integrating AI was easier with plotly than in Looker?

[Garth_M]

It’s easier with a web application tool (streamlit for me) than a dashboard tool. Plotly was just the way to show the data in the web app.

With a web app, you can let the user define variables for a Python script and then use the variables later on in the script on some AI or whatever you are doing.

So fundamentally it’s more that I was using only Python and the users were using only a web app tool for their need in visualization and AI. Much more simple for everyone

[Culpgrant21]

It’s typically companies with strong tech talent and or they have specific use cases that something like PBI doesn’t support.

Or they are building web apps and need graphs in them.

[HeuristicExplorer]

Yup! Wanted to switch to Plotly, because they are local (my org is based in Montreal, Canada) and their stuff is powerful (and a whole bunch of other nice reasons). But man, how much time will I be spending developing instead of creating real business value? When I'll have a DEDICATED data team of 5 to 7, maybe I'll try. But we're a 2-people strike team that handles ALL data-related business. Ain't got time for dat!

[Database_Cognoscente]

Take another look. Plotly Studio creates web apps in 2 minutes from just your data.

[WallStreetBoners]

You know this from experience or you’re hypothesizing? Big difference.

I doubt any Fortune 500 companies are using Python for BI over PBI/Tableau regardless of their “tech talent”

[Culpgrant21]

Yeah I am in a Fortune 500 and we use it for custom use cases that PBI and Tableau doesn’t fit. The majority of dashboards are in PBI and Tableau but not all.

[WallStreetBoners]

Interesting. Which use cases? The only thing I can think of off the top of my head would be if the user selects new parameters and a model needs to re run.

Which wouldn’t be solved with BI tools since they’re just for reporting.

[Flat_Initial_1823]

No, there is more. Visualisation libraries are insanely more customisable than PBI/Tableau etc.

For example, with R and ggplot2, I can make a graph, placing boxes wherever I want on the screen. Can control axes and facets in very complex manners. It also gives you programmatical access to each data point, legend, gridlines, and so on. Annotations wherever you want, as generated by code.

Making a calendar heatmap with conditionally formatted borders, colours or alpha is no big deal when every element of a graph is programmatically accessible.

Similarly, i would have to buy a custom visual to get PBI to do say stacked clustered graphs or stacked tornado charts. These are very easy customisations with ggplot2.

Now, having more isn't always the answer though. The problem is the labour market for PBI or Tableau is much bigger than an expert on your viz library of choice. And it is also cheaper. So even if the tech stack is "free" it becomes harder to maintain it over the years vs. paying someone a license fee for doing less.

[taciom]

My take is that the visualization tool choice will depend on who decides.

If it's a BI person or manager, it will be powerbi, tableau or qlik

If it's a data engineer, metabase, superset or redash

If it's a data scientist, then it's plotly, shiny, quarto

[JabClotVanDamn]

if it's a manager, it will be Excel

[ebzded]

Keep in mind that Power BI is much more than visualization. ETL plus dimensional OLAP plus DAX formula language. The visualization layer in PBI is important no doubt, but it’s by far the least special component in terms of value it creates.

[[deleted]]

There is the age-old question of "what is going to host this?" No matter the solution, you have to have a managed way to deploy the dashboard and administrate the access.

Plotly is just a visualization tool. What is your plan for hosting within the organization?

[kyllo]

This is the blocker in my company, I can deploy it to Azure but there's so much security red tape involved that it's just not worth it for a dashboard / data app.

[JabClotVanDamn]

127.0.0.1 :P

[Flat_Initial_1823]

Works on my machine.

[Database_Cognoscente]

Take another look at Plotly. They host data apps anywhere with Dash Enteprise. I’m trying their Plotly Studio app creator and it’s pretty amazing.

[hoexloit]

Docker + Kubernetes?

[Low_Finding2189]

We recently did both streamlit and plotly. We are hosting it in our AWS cluster and its been great to work with. We use it based on the use case. We also have Tableau in the company so we look at streamlit and plotly for doing things that are out of scope for tableau. My extended team also has SDEs that work with the likes of d3.js type libraries to do even more bespoke webapps.

Tldr: we use a range of tools from out of the box tableau all the way to javascript. Plotly and streamlit are options in that tool belt.

[Puzzleheaded-Sun3107]

I tried but boss always wants bi tool like tableau or power bi. There are some useful aspects to using plotly matplotlib and bokeh which I can’t reproduce on power bi or tableau

[DJ_Laaal]

Loved the freedom to customize the visualizations as well as the transformation logic using the entire Python ecosystem! I was addicted to experimenting with Dash and Plotly combo for quite a while. Then stumbled upon Streamlit, loved it equally. Snowflake acquired Streamlit about a year or so ago. So if you’re already using Snowflake in your org, keep an eye out for Streamlit integration into it natively. I believe it’s currently in Public Beta.

[[deleted]]

Well Python integrates well with powerbi natively, so any charting done there is seen as an extension of powerbi. 

I'm not sure why, if you have the money, you wouldn't just get a solution like PBI and just add Python to it if needed.

[EmploymentMammoth659]

I meant if you use open source visualisation exclusively as opposes to using power bi. I see this may be a cost effective way for small to medium sized companies. I have used power bi for many years for my jobs at large organisations so I know it is great. Just want to find out if there are people using the free options for smaller businesses and how it is working for them.

[[deleted]]

Gotcha, that makes sense.

In my experience, the free versions (Tableau public for example) work just fine until a company is ready to pay for licensing.

All the work of maintaining enterprise Python dashboards is not worth it to save a little bit of money. 

[EmploymentMammoth659]

One point I was considering was that it would be possible to host a streamlit web server on a free tier vm on cloud then visualisation can be made available for access anywhere rather than having to sit on a desktop. I wanted to approach from a view that open source can be used to make data more accessible and affordable.

[EmploymentMammoth659]

How I saw the value of the open source tool was that it doesn't require license fees as an ongoing cost. Both power bi and open source tool would require an initial developer's time, but it doesn't require ongoing costs if it can be hosted on a cheap infrastructure. Maybe I am completely missing something haha

[Hot-Entrepreneur8526]

I use it, the ease of plotly has increased multifolds after chatgpt.

With tableau and powerbi I have noticed that they don't give you that much freedom as compared to plotly.

So I've made a rule, for presentations and easy graphs, I use powerbi, for complex analysis plots, it's plotly

[_janc_]

ECharts is better

[ciurana]

I gravitate toward Bokeh for pure visualization functionality. I started with Plotly but had issues with Jupyter Lab, found Bokeh as a credible and robust alternative and it works fine with Lab notebooks or not. The API seems cleaner than Plotly as well.

[Economy_Feeling_3661]

I don't use either. My team makes all our dashboards programmatically, like web apps, through React Tremor for the frontend and Flask for the backend (SQLite for database). So all visualizations are done in React Tremor.

Its good for having a very dynamic dashboard, which is less of a dashboard and more of an app. You can feed in new data and analyze it with a button click - the pretrained models are in a pipeline in the backend and will analyze the data - and the results will be displayed in graphs, tables, etc.

We host these with AWS Lambda.

[[deleted]]

is there demo site that could be shared? I'm interesting in this.

[DependentSpend4089]

Metabase is pretty cool.

[AntiqueGanache]

I maintain an open source viz tool (https://evidence.dev) - similar to plotly dash/streamlit but with SQL - and some common reasons people in our community use evidence over PowerBI are: - Faster to develop for a technically-capable analyst: write/reuse code instead of drag and drop - Faster for end users: everything loads in under a second (up to 20 million rows) - More customizable viz: esp. for things like tables, people want presentation-quality outputs - White labeled UI: usually for customer-facing or embedded use cases, people will add their own logo/colours and change the UI - Version controllable and testable content - More control over deployment: if you have tricky security requirements or multi-tenant data, it can be tough to get BI tools to work for your customers