pChart – PHP charting library

Looking for some good looking graphs without having to pay for a library or resort to Flash graphs? Try creating your own using pChart. pChart is a PHP class oriented framework designed to create aliased charts. This project focuses on allowing developers to generate great looking graphs by increasing rendering quality introducing an aliasing algorithm.

The graphs from pChart are generated using GD library, so you’ll need that installed on your server if you’re planning to use this library.

The documentation does mention that creating real time graphs will be pretty CPU intensive so you may want to look at caching or pre-generating the graphs. To help you with this, the pChart framework also comes with pCache which helps in caching graphs – so you don’t have to keep rendering graphs on the fly. To get to know more on pChart and how to use it, head over to their documentation page. For a look at the graphs you can generate using this library, take a look at the chart gallery.

Link: pChart Project Home Page

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8 Responses to “pChart – PHP charting library”
  1. Kevin 22 October 2008 at 8:16 pm #

    I used that in a customer project, its a simple to use PHP API.

    For small charts, you could use the Google Chart API instead, but a lot of people more like to use self-hosted solutions, so pChart i your friend ;)

    libChart is another PHP solution: http://naku.dohcrew.com/libchart/

  2. dave 23 October 2008 at 4:00 am #

    there is a graphing library in pear, image_graph
    as well as jpgraph, http://www.aditus.nu/jpgraph/
    both are object oriented libraries

    i think there’s also one in pecl, gdchart, but i’m not sure how well that one is maintained

    so there seems to be an abundance of choice for php developers

  3. vinu 23 October 2008 at 1:06 pm #

    @dave and @kevin Thanks for the links – I’ve tried most of the options in the past, but was not too happy with the quality of the graphs.

  4. Vinu Thomas’ Blog: pChart - PHP charting library : Dragonfly Networks

    [...] Thomas points out a nice looking PHP charting library on his blog today – [...]

  5. Philipp 23 October 2008 at 7:43 pm #

    Thank you. Looks promising

  6. Moises 9 December 2008 at 10:43 pm #

    I use now another method. I prefer to send the data and create the graphic in the client with Javascript. Have you seen Flot?

  7. vinu 10 December 2008 at 9:51 am #

    Thankyou Moises – Flot looks pretty good.

  8. Les 22 October 2009 at 9:13 pm #

    The only problem as I recall with libChart is that they insist on putting their own banner on your charts, which is a right turn off…

    That’s like someone watching over you whilst your doing the business :(

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