Plotly vs Windward Core comparison

Plotly and Windward Studios are both solutions in the Reporting category. Plotly is ranked #18 with an average rating of 7.7, while Windward Studios is ranked #25. Plotly holds a 1.2% mindshare in RT, compared to Windward Studios’s 0.5% mindshare. Additionally, 100% of Plotly users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 100% of Windward Studios users who would recommend it.

Plotly

Read 3 Plotly reviews

661 Views
576 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

Windward Core

Read 36 Windward Core reviews

501 Views
160 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

Plotly

Windward Core

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Mar 4, 2025

Windward Core and Plotly compete in the data management and visualization market. Plotly has a clear advantage with visualization, while Windward Core excels in document automation.

Features: Windward Core includes a powerful document generation engine, seamless integration with enterprise systems, and flexible template design. Plotly provides rich interactive visualizations, advanced analytical capabilities, and a strong community-support library.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Windward Core offers streamlined deployment for large-scale integrations and personalized enterprise support. Plotly emphasizes a cloud-based user-driven model with robust community support for troubleshooting.

Pricing and ROI: Windward Core is often preferred for its cost-effectiveness and significant ROI in document processes. Plotly may have higher setup costs due to its comprehensive visualization suite but offers long-term value through enhanced data insights.

To learn more, read our detailed Plotly vs. Windward Core Report (Updated: April 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Plotly vs. Windward Core

April 2025

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Helped 848,207 peers since 2012

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Categories and Ranking

Plotly

Ranking in Reporting

18th

Average Rating

7.6

Reviews Sentiment

6.8

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Windward Core

Ranking in Reporting

25th

Average Rating

8.8

Reviews Sentiment

7.6

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Document Generation Tools (1st)

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2025, in the Reporting category, the mindshare of Plotly is 1.2%, down from 1.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Windward Core is 0.5%, up from 0.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Reporting

Featured Reviews

Hassan Kamkar

Data Analyst at a university with 1,001-5,000 employees

An interactive and easy-to-use solution that can be used to create dashboards

The solution cannot be deployed on the website and shared with others through its own platform. We need a third-party platform to share the application that we develop. In Tableau and Power BI, we can simply share the website with others as long as we use the paid version. However, for Plotly, we need to deploy our app on a cloud-based service like AWS or other third-party websites to share with others.

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Hit Mistry

Vice President at PSC Group, LLC

It has streamlined a lot of our reporting processes

Their PDF needs improvement. We've run into some issues when we tried to generate a Word document. If we try to generate the same document in PDF, sometimes it doesn't look exactly the same. We have gone back to Windward support a couple of times on a few issues, e.g., we had some issues with reports that had barcodes on them. The barcode wasn't displaying properly. It was displaying as a skewed image as opposed to an actual barcode. Therefore, we worked with Windward support, having some daily calls with them. Then, within the next release, they were able to resolve the issue. They even gave us a pre-release, so we could implement it into our code before the actual official release on the website. It would be nice to have some sort of workflow capability within the product. Anytime you generate a document, nine out of ten times there is something which precedes that document, whether it's entering parameters in, e.g., if I'm requesting the status report for a project. The first thing that I usually want from a status perspective is which project is the status report for and which week is it for, as those are some of the things that I have to supply before I can generate a document. From a workflow perspective, it would be nice to say, "This project belongs to this person, and this person is okay with me pulling information out of this document for whatever need I have." From a workflow perspective, I would like a wizard interface that goes step-by-step, like a questionnaire, where there are a bunch of things that you have to answer, "Yes or no," before it knows what to do or how to produce the document. Right now, we write our own custom UI for this.

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Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Pros

"It is a scalable solution. Scalability-wise, I rate the solution a nine to ten out of ten."

"When reviewing and interpreting data, I typically examine it in a tabular form to understand its structure. However, when explaining or presenting the findings to others, I often use visualization tools such as Plotly. These tools allow me to create visual representations of datasets."

"The level of interactivity that the product provides is valuable to me."

"From an integration perspective, they provide the code for you to easily integrate with existing applications."

"The usually the response is within one hour. The technical support will WebEx with you. I rate them as a 10 out of 10."

"The most valuable feature is the fact that it uses Microsoft Word and Microsoft Excel as base templates, so when you generate, it's easy for clients to upgrade, and maintain, and generate out either a PDF or an actual Excel spreadsheet."

"Creating dynamic table of contents (TOC) based on dynamic data in different reports."

"The engine being able to sit inside of our firewall is the most important feature."

"The solution is very flexible, so you can create anything you want. Think of the possibilities you have in Excel or in Word, because these are the two document generators that are used the most. I only use Word, but I can use nearly every feature in Word, including making charts and tables, and produce those features in Windward, parametrically."

"The most valuable feature is the Rich Text or TinyMCE in fields. For example, you have a text field but it is not a regular text field, it is a link. Inside this link, you can copy/paste everything: images, text, and tables together. After saving this field, you can pull it into the document."

"Thanks to Windward, our documents need very few tweaks and are usually "customer-ready" right out of the box."

More Windward Core pros

Cons

"The solution cannot be deployed on the website and shared with others through its own platform."

"The tool needs to improve its pie charts. Regarding Plotly, I find the online documentation somewhat challenging to navigate, especially when dealing with many parameters. Searching through thousands of parameters can be a tedious and less straightforward process. While the documentation is available online and serves its purpose, I often encounter difficulties in finding the information."

"I believe that the prices of the tool's paid services could be on the premium side, so the pricing model can be considered for improvement."

"The next release could benefit from a cloud-based environment."

"They should add a document distribution solution on top of the document generation capability. It should allow us to send the generated document to a certain recipient (e.g. customer contact’s email address) based on a business-rules management system. That system would allow the end-user to manage a relationship between a document template and its recipient."

"Is there any way to avoid AutoTag loading in Word/Excel each time? I need to use it from time to time - quite rarely. AutoTag affects performance of Word/Excel. I do not want to install/uninstall AutoTag each time I need it."

"They're not a gigantic company, so they just don't have all the capital to do whatever they would want to do. That's the only reason I would hold back even that one point. I know that if I do ask for something, I'll get it. I just know that it will take some time."

"AutoTag needs to be web-based, so our customers can create reports from our web."

"I'm still working in Office 2016, and we have had some issues, but Windward is very quick to react when there is a problem. We are also going to switch over to Office 365 and that will solve a few of the problems."

"They could make the document creation performance faster. I'm not saying it's slow but it takes time to create the PDFs. If they could make it faster, that would be one area for improvement."

"A lot of clients who want to use this don't have the technical background for the SQL portion of gathering the data. If Windward were to make a more user-friendly SQL extract front-end, that would help a lot of clients to leverage the application a lot more."

More Windward Core cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It is an open-source tool. My company hasn't explored Plotly's premium services yet, but I believe the prices could be on the premium side."

"I only use the free tier of the product."

"It is absolutely worth the value. They have flexibility, depending on what you're looking for from a buying standpoint. The current pricing models are quite flexible, with the ability to use it on an as-needed basis, or to get a perpetual license that covers a customer that might have extensive needs. I think it's pretty good."

"From my experience in this field, the product is reasonably priced, at least with the RESTful engine implementation. It's definitely not a cheap option. People say, "That's a fair amount of money to pay for a document generation tool." At the same time, you do get good functionality and the support is good."

"CapEx fits our requirements, OpEx is higher due to the 20% service and maintenance cost, where we normally pay 15%."

"The pricing is fair. The way that they have it priced is the Windward Designer has a price that's associated with it. Then, depending on the number of cores that you're looking for, that is the price that you pay. The more cores that you want, the more expensive it is."

"We negotiated our prices many years ago, and while they go up a little bit here and there, they've been pretty steady."

"Windward is very expensive when the volume of documents being generated is low and it is cheap when the volume is high."

"For what you're getting, it's an extremely good value."

"The cost is reasonable."

More Windward Core pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

17%

Manufacturing Company

13%

University

Computer Software Company

Financial Services Firm

15%

Computer Software Company

13%

Recreational Facilities/Services Company

Healthcare Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

No data available

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Plotly?

It is a scalable solution. Scalability-wise, I rate the solution a nine to ten out of ten.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Plotly?

It is an open-source tool. My company hasn't explored Plotly's premium services yet, but I believe the prices are on the premium side. I rate the product price as five or six on a scale of one to t...

See all answers

What needs improvement with Plotly?

I believe that the price of the tool's paid services is on the premium side, so the pricing model can be considered for improvement.

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Comparisons

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Compared 32% of the time

Microsoft Power BI vs Windward Core

Compared 29% of the time

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Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Reporting

April 2025

Download Plotly product report

Buyer's Guide

Windward Core

March 2025

Download Windward Core product report

Also Known As

No data available

Windward, Windward Studios

Overview

Plotly creates leading open source tools for composing, editing, and sharing interactive data visualization via the Web.

Our collaboration servers (available in cloud or on premises) allow data scientists to showcase their work, make graphs without coding, and collaborate with business analysts, designers, executives, and clients.

Plotly

What is Windward Studios?

For over a decade, Windward has been a leader in the software development industry by creating the most innovative and advanced document automation and reporting software on the planet.

Data-Driven Document Automation

Generate stunning documents that incorporate relevant data easily and seamlessly.

Visually Striking Designs

Our software provides innovative tools and features to build beautiful designs and stunning layouts, all within the familiar Microsoft Office Suite. Your imagination is the only limitation.

Agile Document Logic

We offer the best document automation software for the new millennium. With our conditional logic functionality, you can swiftly personalize the document content to gratify your end users.

Huge Time Saver

Looking for faster template creation that enables you to keep pace with your business? With our software, template creation takes minutes and you do not need any programming experience to get it done.

Exceptionally Intuitive Interface

Our program's design offers documents that can be edited, customized and designed using MS Office. Enjoy a stress-free document automation experience in programs you already know.

Efficient Savings

Significantly reduce the resources and time required for template development by using our streamlined template design and document automation tools.

Windward Studios

Sample Customers

Google, Goji, VIT, Smpl Bio, U.S. Air Force, C12 Energy, New York University

HAL, Inc., Axe Group, White Clark Group, Blueprint Software, Aspect Security, Nucleus Software, LeBlanc’s Food Stores, South Sound 911, Aegon, Barclays, Fidelity Investments, ArisGlobal LLC, USDA, RepLink, AON Hewitt

Buyer's Guide

Plotly vs. Windward Core

April 2025

Free Report: Plotly vs. Windward Core

Find out what your peers are saying about Plotly vs. Windward Core and other solutions. Updated: April 2025.

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