The Data Visualization Society annually carries on The State of the Industry Survey for specialists from all over the datavis world. And then DVS offers to analyze and visualize the data.

This year, I focused on which tools and how often members of the data visualization community use to visualize data.

I used the question "How often do you use each of the following technologies for data visualization?" responses. There were the following options for each tool: "often", "sometimes", "rarely", "never". Based on them I made color scale. Also there was an option to skip the question, it could be considered as "never", but I marked skipped answers separately.

Using the data of all the responses of those who answered this question I made a tool rating. The tools are sorted by the sum of the shares of respondents who chose "often" and "sometimes".

Excel and PowerPoint are predictably on the top. It’s nice that there is also Pen & paper there.

For the further research I focused on four groups: academics, employees and/or freelancers (combined into one group), hobbyists and students.

Employee and/or freelancer group is significantly larger than all other selected groups. Obviously there could be a bias in the total rating; we actually see the rating and distribution only for this large group. But I would like to understand to what extent representatives of different communities are unanimous in the choice of tools. Also it seemed interesting to look at each tool separately.

So I made diagrams for each tool with distribution of shares of respondents who use it with different frequency. They are arranged according to the overall rating, which I showed above.

It’s interesting how much more often students use Adobe Illustrator than representatives of other groups, with Figma leading the way among "hobbyists."

Also I wanted to see which tools were the most popular among each group. You can see top-10 below.

But it's also interesting to see how selected groups use less popular technologies. For all groups I kept the same order from the overall rating to see the differences and specifics in popularity of tools. Also I added a visualization of the number of respondents in each group to complete the picture.

By the way, you can see from the percentage of skipped answers how much more responsible representatives of the scientific community are towards research than representatives of all other selected groups.