06. Introduction to Flourish

Comparing Tableau to Flourish

Tableau and Flourish are two very powerful data storytelling tools that have similarities and differences. They can be seen used to complement each other rather than just to replace each other, and they each have their own areas of strength.

Tableau Public allows users to connect to raw data and find interesting data stories. However, while it’s possible to create animations in the application, the “play” button does not appear in the browser after publishing*.

Flourish is a data storytelling tool that’s best to use when you have formatted your data and you know what chart types to use in your data story. It has smooth animation and ability to add audio files for sharing data stories in the browser.

More about Flourish

Flourish was created by the team at Kiln, an award-winning data studio that has created data story projects for clients like The Guardian, BBC and the Financial Times.

Flourish provides a free version that, similar to Tableau Public, requires publishing work to the public domain. They also provide a commercial version that allows people with proprietary data, such as at companies, to keep their work private, and also do things like download the full HTML code of the projects they create.

Flourish allows users to quickly converts spreadsheets into "stunning online charts, maps and interactive stories" as described by Flourish. It doesn’t require any coding, and it focuses on enabling storytelling and animation of data. It allows users to either share directly or embed visualizations and stories on their own websites.

In this course, we’ll make use of the free version, and create projects using data that’s already in the public domain.