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Building interactive, data-driven dashboards has become essential for applications across all industries, and Highcharts stands out as a powerful tool to make this process simpler and more effective.
Highcharts is a JavaScript charting library designed for ease of use, allowing developers to embed responsive, feature-rich charts into applications with minimal setup. It offers the flexibility and power to bring complex data to life with its wide range of chart types and compatibility with popular front-end frameworks.
In this article, we’ll cover:
- Key features of Higcharts, including a breakdown of what makes this charting library a powerful tool for visualization.
- Highcharts benefits and limitations.
- A step-by-step guide for using Highcharts to create robust and interactive visualizations.
- How a platform like Embeddable can complement Highcharts, streamline backend processes, and deliver advanced functionality with minimal effort.
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What is Highcharts?
Highcharts is a powerful JavaScript charting library, widely used by developers to create visually appealing and interactive data visualizations.
Built on a source-available license, Highcharts offers access to its source code for review and customization but requires a commercial license for proprietary usage.
This setup has made it one of the go-to options among developers who need extensive charting capabilities but don’t want the cost and effort of developing a charting library from scratch.
You have two ways to work with Highcharts—as a charting library within your project, or in the Highcharts Dashboard platform. Both options are useful, though for those who want more freedom to customize their projects, using it as a charting library within their project will offer more flexibility.
The library is known for its extensive customization options and high level of interactivity, setting it apart from other JavaScript charting libraries like D3.js or Chart.js.
For instance, D3.js provides a high-level API and pre-built chart types and offers a lot of control over every aspect of your chart, but it also requires more coding. D3 may feel more flexible than Highcharts, but it has a steeper learning curve and you’ll need advanced JavaScript skills to work with it effectively.
Chart.js, known for its simplicity and ease of use, lacks advanced features that Highcharts provides, like responsive scaling. Chart.js may be great for simple charts and applications, but if you need more complexity and customization, Highcharts can provide more options.
Plus, Highcharts offers developers a vast range of chart types, allowing them to present data in a clear and engaging manner. Options include but are not limited to line charts, pie and donut charts, heatmaps, and more.
There’s an interesting twist here. Highcharts divides chart types into five modules: CORE, STOCK, MAP, GANTT, and DASHBOARDS.
Highcharts modules: CORE
This is the foundation of Highcharts and includes essential chart types, such as line charts, bar charts, pie charts, scatter plots, bubble charts, heatmaps, and basic 3D charts.
Below you can see an example of a line chart created with Highcharts’ CORE module. Each line on the chart represents a different category of the US Solar employment growth.
These core charts are versatile and widely applicable, making this module suitable for standard data visualization needs across industries. The CORE module has flexible licensing options, including free and paid licenses.
Highcharts offers a free license for non-commercial use, but for commercial projects, you’ll need a paid license, which starts at $168 per developer, per year.
Highcharts modules: STOCK
This module is perfect for financial and time-series data, making it popular in finance, trading, and related sectors. It includes specialized charts like candlestick charts, OHLC (Open-High-Low-Close) charts, and technical indicators that are essential for financial analysis.
The image below depicts a sample candlestick chart built with Highcharts’ STOCK module. The chart is interactive and responsive and you can select whether you want to view the stock evolution over 1 month, 3 months, 6 months, or 1 year respectively.
Pricing for STOCK is typically higher because of its advanced features and starts at approximately $336 per developer, per year, with additional costs for teams or large enterprises.
Highcharts modules: MAPS
As you may have guessed from the name, Highcharts MAPS provides geographic visualization tools, such as choropleth maps, marker maps, and map projections.
It is ideal for displaying data in a spatial context and is often used in sectors like logistics, demographics, and climate analysis.
Below you can view a distribution map chart built with Highcharts showing the composition of the Roman Empire.
The MAPS module starts at about $228 per developer, per year with enterprise pricing options available for larger-scale implementations.
Highcharts modules: GANTT
The Highcharts GANTT module is best for project management and scheduling, featuring Gantt charts that display timelines, task dependencies, and progress tracking.
This module allows for interactive manipulation of taskbars, letting users adjust start and end dates or link tasks, making it highly interactive for project management applications.
For instance, the image below presents a Gantt chart for project management built with Highcharts’ GANTT module. There are two projects represented on the chart and you can view all their respective subtasks and their deadlines clearly on the chart. Tasks are also color-coded so you can easily identify them and spot the ones with the most pressing deadlines.
Pricing for the GANTT module also starts at approximately $203 per developer, per year.
Highcharts modules: DASHBOARDS
This module is a recent addition to Highcharts, aimed at simplifying the creation of multi-chart dashboards by providing a grid on which to organize them.
It enables users to combine various chart types (from the CORE, STOCK, MAPS, and GANTT modules) into a single, interactive view, allowing end-users to see a range of data insights simultaneously.
This module includes built-in tools for adding filters, data range selectors, and layout options, making it easier for developers to build dynamic, user-friendly dashboards without manually coding every interaction—although you’ll still have to write the SQL behind each chart.
Below you can see a project management dashboard created with Highcharts’ DASHBOARD module. It includes the number of complete and incomplete tasks, a pie chart providing an overview of the tasks’ status, a bar chart showing how many tasks each employee has, the project’s timeline, and more.
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Prices start at $251 per developer, per year when you buy only Highcharts Dashboards. If you want CORE, STOCK, MAPS, or GANTT modules as well, you’ll need to add their prices to the total.
HighCharts Compatibility
Highcharts integrates with various popular frontend frameworks, making it an accessible choice for developers working with different technologies and project requirements. Its modular structure and flexibility allow it to be incorporated smoothly into applications across a range of frameworks, including:
- React. With its component-based structure, React is a popular choice for building dynamic user interfaces. Highcharts provides a dedicated React wrapper, allowing you to quickly implement charts as React components.
- Angular. Known for its strong typing and extensive toolkit, Angular is ideal for enterprise-level applications. Highcharts' Angular wrapper simplifies integration with Angular components, allowing developers to embed charting within them.
- Vue.js. Vue’s lightweight and flexible nature pairs well with Highcharts, making it a great choice for projects focused on speed and performance. When used together, they allow you to create interactive charts that respond quickly to changes in data.
- Svelte (new). Hightcharts for Svelte is lightweight and allows you to add charts to your Svelte app without compromising performance. Svelte’s reactive data model ensures that chart updates are instantaneous, enabling smooth, interactive visualizations.
You’ll also be able to use Vanilla JS or TypeScript if you’re so inclined!
Highchart reviews
Users appreciate Highcharts for its versatility and ease of use. The online reviews are, for the most part, positive, giving Highcharts a 4.5 out of 5 score on the popular review platform, G2.
For instance, one user states, “What I find truly appealing about Highcharts software is its incredible versatility in chart creation. It offers a wide array of options, allowing me to generate almost all types of charts effortlessly. The efficiency it brings to data visualization and interpretation is impressive, enabling me to convey complex data insights in a clear and understandable manner.”
However, if we read further among other Highcharts reviews, we’ll also find a few that highlight its limitations. One such user says, “Integrating Highcharts was smooth, but we found that adding more customization required additional development effort, particularly when working with large datasets.”
That’s not the only complaint users have. Another developer on the same platform, explains, “For anything beyond the basic templates and slight variations on them, you have to write code. In today's world, this is not visual chart making—it is coding with a quick view of the results. Much coding is a waste of my time. I expect that it will be a long time before Highcharts catches up with the graphic design world's needs.”
While Highcharts provides a strong foundation for building data visualization, it’s obvious from user reviews that creating a customized analytics experience often requires extra layers.
A complex app will need more customization and flexibility, advanced data management and performance tools, and the option to allow users to easily enable features for exporting, scheduling and creating their own custom view of the dashboards.
You could, in theory, add a lot of this through code on top of Highcharts. But the time and effort required might not be worth it in the long run.
A simple, yet powerful solution, is pairing your Highcharts app with a headless embedded analytics tool like Embeddable. That way, you retain full control over your app’s UX and UI, and take advantage of Highcharts tools extensive charting library, while all of the back-end considerations and advanced features are handled for you—more on that later…
How to use Highcharts
To start building with this charting library, you’ll want to pull the charts into your project repository. The Highcharts documentation includes straightforward steps to integrate the library with your preferred framework.
Install Highcharts
Before you can use Highcharts, you need to install it. This is a straightforward process and you’ll need to use npm or yarn to install the library in your project, e.g.:
npm install highcharts
Next, you’ll need to install Javascript files in the <head> section of the webpage to load Highcharts from the CDN. This loads files from the Highcharts servers, but if you want to load files from your own servers, you can also do that, which would require a line of code like in the example below:
<script src="/js/highcharts.js"></script>
Please, keep in mind that code snippets are for exemplification purposes only. For more in-detail code, refer to the Highcharts docs.
Integrate with your framework
Import the necessary modules, then embed the chart component wherever required. Highcharts offers integrations with React, Svelte, Vue.js, Angular, and many other frameworks.
Customize the components
Despite complaints from users that customization options are limited, Highcharts allows you to modify elements like colors, labels, animations, and interactions.
Connect your data and build Interactions
Beyond these basics, using Highcharts as frontend charting components in your application will require additional steps such as connecting to data sources, setting up caching for large or complex data queries, and configuring custom interactions between charts.
You may also want to add export options, enabling end-user self-service. Another requirement may be scheduling reports which can enhance user engagement, though these additional considerations require extra code and configuration to achieve—and are not supplied natively with HighCharts.
Benefits of headless embedded analytics
Highcharts is one of the best Javascript charting libraries available, but it is far from perfect. Despite its many features and integrations, there’s still a lot of work, and manual code writing developers need to do when working on even simple applications.
What if you could get the most out of Highcharts and its benefits, without so much extra work?
Embeddable’s headless embedded analytics is a simple, yet powerful solution that simplifies the integration and expansion of Highcharts.
Embeddbale allows you to import your HighCharts charting components and easily develop fully custom, interactive analytics experiences into your application without all the back-end work and configuration of advanced features. The allows developers to focus on building effective, engaging dashboards without getting bogged down by backend complexities. Here’s how it can help.
Build without extra complexity
Embeddable handles backend functionalities such as query writing, database connectivity, caching, and exporting, so you don’t have to.
With it, developers can integrate Highcharts without spending time creating or maintaining these functionalities, which are essential for advanced analytics dashboards.
Retain full frontend control
Because Embeddable supports headless analytics, you maintain full control over your dashboard’s UX/UI.
This means Highcharts visuals remain fully customizable, natively embedded, and highly responsive, providing a consistent, native feel across applications.
Save engineering time
Integrating Highcharts with Embeddable also means that engineers don’t need to spend time creating complex workarounds for basic analytics requirements like ensuring fast loading, creating interactivity, and enabling personalization for your end users.
How to use Highcharts with Embeddable
Integrating Highcharts with Embeddable is a straightforward process that involves the following steps:
- Define your charts
Start by importing Highcharts into your project and adding the necessary components for your desired charts. Go to the steps previously highlighted in this article for a full guide on installing Highcharts.
- Push to Embeddable.
Use Embeddable’s SDK to upload and configure your Highcharts charts as dashboards. This step integrates your visualizations into the Embeddable platform, allowing you to easily connect them to your data and build custom dashboards with advanced features enabled in a few clicks.
- Create your dashboard.
Using the no-code builder, combine your charts with data models and build your dashboard quickly. Add advanced features like exporting or toggling on interactions between charts and controls like filters, and give your users the option to build their own views of your dashboards.
- Embed with a web component.
Deploy your dashboard in your application using Embeddable’s web component. Follow the instructions to add a script tag and render the dashboard anywhere on the page. Charts and data will load natively, providing a fast-loading and seamless experience, and enabling two-way communication with your application.
For more information and code examples, check out the Embeddable docs.
Create interactive dashboards, fast, with Highcharts and headless embedded analytics
Highcharts is a strong JavaScript charting library for projects that need interactive, visually appealing charts. Its wide array of chart options and compatibility with popular frameworks makes it one of the best JavaScript charting libraries available.
Despite all that, there’s still a lot of work to do once you’ve imported and customized your basic charting components—you’ll still need to do a lot of work to hook everything up and have all the features you need.
Embeddable’s headless embedded analytics is a fast and powerful solution to bring your HighCharts charts to life as interactive customer-facing dashboards. It can enable you to benefit from Highcharts’ functionalities while significantly reducing backend development effort on delivering the overall project.
Used together, Highcharts and Embeddable offer a comprehensive solution, enabling fast deployment and end-user self-service while maintaining control over design and performance.
For organizations looking to build data visualizations that are both powerful and effortless to manage, this integration could be an ideal choice.
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Frequently asked questions about Highcharts
Does Highcharts have a wide range of charts?
Yes, Highcharts provides a comprehensive selection of chart types across its different modules, including line, bar, scatter, pie, and donut charts in the CORE module, as well as specialized charts like candlestick charts in the STOCK module and Gantt charts in the GANTT module. All of which can be used with Embeddable.
What customization options are available in Highcharts?
Highcharts allows extensive customization options, from adjusting colors and fonts to modifying chart animations and interactivity. To bring those charts to life as a dashboard, you’ll either need to build, manage and maintain the backend service, or pair it with a solution like Embeddable. This gives you all the power of HighCharts, whilst saving your engineers lots of time on the overall project.
Does Highcharts work in React, Angular, and Vue?
Yes, Highcharts is compatible with React, Angular, and Vue, offering dedicated wrappers and modules for each of these popular front-end frameworks. This compatibility makes it easy to integrate Highcharts within your existing applications, taking advantage of each framework's features while providing powerful, interactive visualizations.