What Datawrapper is and who's behind it

If you've never heard of Datawrapper, you might wonder what it is and who's behind it. Here we answer both questions. 

What's Datawrapper? 

Datawrapper is an online tool that lives at datawrapper.de. With it, you can create three kinds of visualizations: 

Our focus is on beautiful design defaults, an easy interface, and responsiveness. Although we offer a PDF and SVG export, most users create visualizations with Datawrapper that they embed on the web.  

Who uses Datawrapper?

We're used by newsrooms, think tanks, agencies, government institutions, and finance companies all over the world. Here are some of our current customers:

To learn how we're used by some companies, head to the customer stories on our blog.

How can you use Datawrapper?

Datawrapper has a strong free plan with which you can start charting/mapping right now! Simply head to datawrapper.de, click on the big Start creating button and you'll land in our app. 

Select the sample datasets in step 1 if you don't have an own dataset handy. We also offer two in-depth tutorials on how to create your first chart and how to create your first map with Datawrapper.

Who's behind Datawrapper?

Datawrapper is a tool created by more than 20 people, led by David Kokkelink as the CEO, Mirko Lorenz as the chairman of the board and co-founder, and Gregor Aisch as the CTO.  We work together to create the best charting tool for everyone who wants to show their data in beautiful charts and maps.

As toolmakers, we share the responsibility for the design of the charts and maps our users create. We think a lot about what makes a good chart good. What’s important for our users. And what’s important for those who will eventually look at their charts.

Our background helps:  We spent many years studying data visualization and working as practitioners in international newsrooms like the New York Times, NPR, Deutsche Welle, Bloomberg, Correctiv and ZEIT Online. We’ve given dozens (hundreds?) of workshops and talks, contributed to community discussions through widely shared blog posts and worked on open source tools and resources that are being used around the world.

We learned a thing or two about good chart design.  Now we want to make our users benefit from these learnings – so that they can skip the beginner’s mistakes and create well-designed charts, maps, and tables.

You can find information about all of us on datawrapper.de/about-us.

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