About

About ChartSQL Development, why we built it and where we're headed.

What you Query is What you Chart

Our primary philosophy is SQL is the language of data. There should be zero friction to go from a SQL report, to a beautiful client accessible chart. Our mission with ChartSQL is simple: What you Query is What you Chart. Our vision is for ChartSQL to be the easiest way for developers to visualize SQL.

We built ChartSQL for SQL Developers

ChartSQL was created by Rory Laitila at SalesInsights.io. We are an engineering first company that builds our data models in SQL. We love using SQL as our data pipeline and reporting layer. However when it comes to charting, nothing met our needs.

Why not PowerBI?

Business visualization tools like Excel, PowerBI and Tableau are oriented towards WYSIWYG editors and business people, which does not meet our needs as developers. We want to keep our visualizations close to our data models which are all in SQL.

Why not the Cloud?

Cloud "self-service" analytics platforms like Metabase and Google/Looker Data Studio are inflexible, slow and not great for multi-tenant agency work. We want to be able to write our SQL models once, and use them across customers.

Why not Pyhton/R/Matlab?

We build models in SQL. We don't like to switch between SQL and programming languages just to visualize. We also needed a platform that was web first, embeddable, customizable, and beautiful to show to clients.

Future Vision for ChartSQL

We want ChartSQL and its declarative visualization language to become the defacto standard for visualizing SQL models. We will continue to add more advanced features, while keeping it easy to start. "Make the easy things easy, and the hard things possible" is our motto.