Data Visualization: What is the best software for making infographs?

There is a bunch of good tools & softwares out there to create infographics and visualization. Here are those I like the most :

Desktop software :

• Gephi  for network-related visualization. Allows to create nice complex graph from any node-edge data.
• The R Project  If you need to really manipulate data, R is the language to use for statistics and has lots of useful libraries. I advice to use RStudio to work with a nice IDE though.
• Tableau Software a very neat dashboard to create interactive graphs. It has a free version available.

Web-based tools :

• Datawrapper a very straightforward tool to create customizable charts online
• Infogr.am a nice web interface for charts and infographics with ready-to-use templates and online hosting/publishing
• Visual.ly a great source of inspiration that recently adds some quick templates for social media reports

Developer toolkit : (those will require you to write code)

• Processing may be the best place to start if you are a designer / new to programming. Processing is a visual-first language with a very simple syntax, plus it comes with a nice GUI and has many great libraries to achieve almost anything you can dream of. The Javascript version Processing.js will make your visualization available to use on websites as well.
• d3 is a powerful Javascript library that has already many graphs and viz templates that you can hack for your own purposes.
• Raphaël is another Javascript library that can comes in a handy if you need to draw vector graphics and add interactions to it. It has quite good documentation.

If you want to dig deeper, Datavisualization.chmaintained a list of tools to be used for data visualization.

This text was originally published in quora.