This is a featured blog post by Amy Cesal, Product Evangelist at everviz. A three-time winner of the Information is Beautiful awards, Amy is an instructor at Maryland Institute College of Art and co-founder of the Data Visualization Society.
What else is there besides the bar chart to compare numbers?
The bar chart is possibly the most used and some might say overused chart type. It’s a workhorse. You can use it to show almost any type of data from categorical to time series. It’s one of the first chart types we learn in school, and it’s a natural fit for the go to visualization type.
However, it can be overused. When you’re scrolling through a report or dashboard with only bar charts, you can get bar chart fatigue because none of them are standing out. Chart type variety can help you keep your audience engaged with the information and increase memorability.
Here are five alternatives to the bar chart.
- Slope chart
- Cleveland Dot plot
- Benchmark
- 100% Bar
- Butterfly
Let’s take a look at how the bar chart can work with these different chart formats, and how each format highlights the information differently.
Here we are using population growth numbers of 5 cities from 2000 to 2023.
Slope Chart
Slope charts are great for comparing between 2 points in time, like before and after an event. They have an implied ordering of left to right. While the ordering across comparisons for a slope chart does not have to be time, it could be any other variable with natural ordering like before and after or low and high. Be aware that your reader is going to scan the slope chart from left to right, so you want to have an x-axis for a slope chart with a logical order.
Cleveland Dot plot
Where the number matters, rather than the amount. Easier to compare amounts that are similar. If zero is not an important reference point, this can make more sense than a bar chart. If you are considering a bar chart with a y-axis that doesn’t start at zero (a thing that you should never do!), you should probably be using a cleveland dot plot.
Benchmark Chart
Benchmark charts are useful for comparison between 2 points in time, one metric compared to an historical average or some other meaningful, well… benchmark.
Other chart types that you might want to explore with different data:
100% bar chart
In a 100% bar chart you emphasize the percentage of a whole. If part of you wants a pie chart, but you’d like your reader to be able to make easier and more valid comparisons across groups than they’d be able to if you used pie-chart small multiples, the 100% bar is a great option.
Back to back/butterfly chart
Butterfly charts work well for diverging metrics like yes/no, agree/disagree, or gains and losses.
