Comparison of Statistical Chart controls dotnetCharting and ZedGraph

Recently I have examined several Statistical Chart Control packages, including ZedGraph and Nplot. However, ZedGraph is more powerful than ZedGraph, which is more convenient than ZedGraph. The charge is much higher. As long as commercial report development tools have the functions of statistical charts, Crystal Reports, ActiveReport, and Reporting services, it is convenient, but dotnetCharting has a single function. The following describes ZedGraph and dotnetCharting from winform usage.

 

In terms of effect, dotnetCharting does not really say that the crystal effect is very dazzling, which should be its biggest selling point. Sample Code with various effects is provided for developers to learn more easily. DotnetCharting needs to set a temporary directory when generating a Statistical Chart to save the image of the generated Statistical Chart. The dotnetCharting chart has a good effect, largely because it generates an image, then display it on the interface. Of course, it sacrifices performance at the cost. At the same time, it does not support scaling. Although you can achieve this by changing the scale of the coordinate axis, the performance is much worse.

If you do not have high performance requirements, dotnetCharting is a good choice.

 

Where is the biggest selling point of ZedGraph? It should be open-source. You can modify the code to meet your needs. For example, when ZedGraph draws a line chart, the line does not use anti-aliasing, you only need to modify the Default settings in the Default structure of the Line class. Compared with dotnetCharting, ZedGraph has a worse effect. However, it is also good if it is adjusted by yourself, but ZedGraph has a better advantage.

 

ZedGraph uses GDI + to draw images directly on the Canvas. Therefore, the performance is guaranteed. If you change the scale of the coordinate axis, ZedGraph responds quickly compared with dotnetCharing. Based on this, ZedGraph provides a very important function of scaling and dragging. You can zoom out the chart by using the scroll wheel, and drag it by clicking the middle mouse, which is very convenient.

 

ZedGraph can be easily used for real-time data changes, such as stock market trends and cpu usage. ZedGraph is painting based on PointPairList, so you only need to add new data to the PointPairList set and then redraw it. for performance, as mentioned above, because we use GDI + directly, the performance is relatively good. I have tested 400 points and it is okay. Therefore, ZedGraph can also meet the demand with strong real-time requirements.

 

In general, the charts generated by dotnetCHARTING have good performance but poor performance, and are not suitable for scenarios with high real-time requirements. ZedGraph is open-source and has poor performance than dotnetCHARTING, but has good performance and can adapt to data with real-time requirements.