Frequently asked questions

Datawrapper is created by a team of designers, developers and journalists who worked in companies like the New York Times, NPR, Deutsche Welle, Bloomberg and ZEIT Online.

The company behind the tool is called Datawrapper GmbH, a German startup owned by Mirko Lorenz, Gregor Aisch, and David Kokkelink. We’re self-funded by our customers’ subscription revenue. Our main office is in Berlin (Prenzlauer Berg), so if you’re in town, say hi! We love lunch breaks with visitors.

You can create 19 different chart types, three map types, and very flexible tables with Datawrapper. The best way to explore them is to simply try it out: Create a Chart or a map now; no need to sign up. Or you can visit our Datawrapper River, which features hundreds of visualizations that other Datawrapper users built and which you can reuse. We also include our own charts in almost all our blog posts, especially in our Weekly Chart.

There are two ways to choose a plan: Sign up, then click on ☰ and “Settings” in the top right, then “Upgrade” (or simply click here to directly go there). You will arrive at a page on which you can select any of our available plans.

If you’re having trouble with that process or additional questions, write to support@datawrapper.de We’re happy to create an account or upgrade a plan for you.

Our Free plan enables you to create, publish, embed and export Datawrapper visualizations as PNGs without limits. We offer such a strong free plan because we know that a lot of our current users and customers find out about Datawrapper through workshops, university classes or by trying out the tool after spotting an embedded visualization online. We want to make it as easy as possible to do that.

But we understand that relying on a service you don’t pay for can feel odd: There must be a downside to it, no? We promise: There is not. Even on the free plan, we ensure to you:

• We won’t sell your data. Some companies make the user into the product, but this is not our business model. All data you upload to Datawrapper is treated as confidential and only belongs to your account.
• We won’t track your readers. Your embedded charts will not contain any code that tracks you or your readers. We’ve never done that, and will continue to not do that, regardless of your plan.
• Your charts are private. You decide when it’s time to share your charts with the world. Until you hit “Publish”, your charts are visible only to you and your team.
• Published charts will stay online indefinitely. We will never delete or disable any of your Datawrapper visualizations that you embedded somewhere. We stand by our pledge to keep all our users’ charts online.

Yes, you have the full copyright to your charts, maps, and tables, no matter with which plan you’ve created them. You can use Datawrapper visualizations exported as PNG, PDF, or SVG in all your printed and digital publications, slides, reports, on websites, etc.

If you’re on our Free plan, you must keep the label “Created with Datawrapper” that you find below your visualization.

Nobody but you can see your visualizations before you publish them. Datawrapper visualizations are private by default until you hit “publish”. You can create as many charts, maps, and tables as you like without publishing a single one.

Datawrapper does not perform any tracking, user-profiling, advertising or data brokering through the Datawrapper visualizations you embed. All our embeds are Do Not Track (DNT) by default. Datawrapper embeds do not set any cookies or other identifiers.

By technical necessity, Datawrapper processes – but not stores – the end user’s IP address when viewing a visualization, as any website does. In accordance with privacy authorities, this is covered as a direct technical requirement to access and does not require dedicated consent.

It takes a lot of energy and time to build and maintain well-designed visualization types. We have some exciting new ones in our pipeline, but they will be added slowly. Basically, we’re always trying to answer the question: What will be most useful for most users? Our current chart and map types won’t be the best fit for all kinds of data – but we hope they will be the best fit for most. Do write to us at support@datawrapper.de if you think that a specific visualization type might be useful for lots of users and use cases.

That said, we also decide consciously against adding certain visualization types. Our tool is designed to be easy to use by everyone, and we are reluctant to add chart types that could easily be misused or bring more harm than good to the data. We wrote down our thoughts on diverging stacked bars and on charts with a dual axis to explain why we have not added these chart types yet.

​The Datawrapper attribution appears if you use our free plan. It allows your readers to discover how they too might be able to make similar charts, maps, or tables as you did. We want to democratise data visualization and enable content creators to tell their data-driven stories without needing special skills or lots of money, which is why we offer such an extensive free plan – and which is why the attribution remains important. To remove it, you’ll need to update to Custom or Enterprise plan.

We’d be sorry to see you go. (Let us know your reasons so that we can improve our app!) But you don’t need to worry about your chart, map, and table creations: Even if you’re not our user anymore, they will stay online forever and remain visible to your readers.

First of all, we’re not planning to shut down or sell the company. We’re alive and well and we’re excited about the future. But you never know. If at some point we can’t host your visualizations anymore, we will make it easy for you to download all your charts, maps, and tables from Datawrapper, to give you the option to host them yourself. Find more information on our blog.