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Plotly Dash Enterprise vs Windward Core comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Feb 8, 2026

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 Dash Enterprise
Ranking in Reporting
17th
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
4.0
Number of Reviews
4
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Windward Core
Ranking in Reporting
21st
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.6
Number of Reviews
36
Ranking in other categories
Document Generation Tools (1st)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of March 2026, in the Reporting category, the mindshare of Plotly Dash Enterprise is 1.8%, up from 1.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Windward Core is 1.1%, up from 0.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Reporting Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Plotly Dash Enterprise1.8%
Windward Core1.1%
Other97.1%
Reporting
 

Featured Reviews

reviewer2785038 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Data Engineer at a transportation company with 501-1,000 employees
Python dashboards have transformed employment data into interactive insights for better decisions
The main improvement I can think of is that while creating charts, it gives you a certain format of how it could look. If you want to create something extra and go more vivid and creative with how the actual chart would look, it allows for that option but could be improved to be more artistic or aesthetically pleasing. This sort of format is missing, and I think it would be beneficial to the analytics team if it can be more interactive, with the capability of D3.js, and give us more control over how our actual dashboard would look to achieve a more aesthetic appearance. The strict format of how you can shape those charts and that extra nuance you need to keep in code to get the exact possible results are the reasons behind my rating. The rest of the features provided by Plotly are extremely good.
CH
Sr. Systems Analyst at a tech services company with 5,001-10,000 employees
Strong layout and design capabilities; leverages every aspect available in Word-native formatting
The licensing key is a little bit twitchy. I'd like to see more HTML formatting support in templates. It has a basic stock of HTML formatting capability, but it doesn't have a rich vocabulary. I have to work around that sometimes. The help documentation and blog posts are extensive, but not always up to date. The error reports also need improvement. If you don't key it in right, it's a little hard to find the root cause. It gives you information as much as it can, but it doesn't really hone in and tell you explicitly what you should do to correct the problem.

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."
"The level of interactivity that the product provides is valuable to me."
"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."
"Plotly Dash Enterprise helps us achieve a much more interactive and vivid form of visualization for our organization, which helps us drive better results and analytics."
"We really could not have started our business, quite honestly, without a document generation engine like Windward."
"Customer Service: Excellent. Always got a response within hours and fixes or guidance quickly."
"Our company is using Windward because it works well with Microsoft Office."
"A useful, easy to use product, which has a lot of features for designing reports."
"The ability for users to have design and layout control is also critically important. Without this ability, procuring report designs would represent a huge bottleneck. Report design tools also enable upsell opportunities for customized reports, with quick turnaround times."
"Managing templates through MS Word, as non technical users can manage output."
"For me so far the Windward document generation software is the preferred solution for creating documents."
"If you're looking for a document solution that is of high quality, that does what it's supposed to do 100 percent of the time, with a company that is a quality company, Windward is the company that you're looking for."
 

Cons

"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 main improvement I can think of is that while creating charts, it gives you a certain format of how it could look."
"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."
"The next release could benefit from a cloud-based environment."
"It is software, so there are always times where things don't work. Most of the time issues happen when trying to move to a new version. There might be problems with reports that were created in an older version, so either we have to make a tweak to the templates or we report it to them and get them to make an adjustment to their software."
"The only thing I can think of, that we'd like it to do, would be the ability to "burst out" reports, meaning one section of a report could be sent out as an email to a manager of a department, say, without having to run multiple reports to do it. As it sits now, we have to do multiple reports to do it."
"Was limited by XML path restrictions. There were a couple of times I wanted to do something in the formulas which was prohibited by XML path but okay to do in Excel and the product is sold as being able to do whatever Excel can do in terms of formulas."
"Regarding AutoTag, we do notice that when you want to refactor a little bit of your template design or when you want to implement changes, sometimes you need a lot of clicks to get the change done. For instance... it would be helpful to be able to find all the identifiers with the old name and replace them with the new name. We haven't found a way to do that with the find-replace tool. Throughout the user-interface of Windward, you need a lot of clicks to get that done."
"There is always room for improvement in the speed, especially with the complex, multi-line Excel spreadsheets."
"When I started a couple of years ago Windward wasn't a very stable product."
"Regarding AutoTag, we do notice that when you want to refactor a little bit of your template design or when you want to implement changes, sometimes you need a lot of clicks to get the change done."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"I only use the free tier of the product."
"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."
"The pricing is very reasonable for what it provides. The report builder is about one grand per user... We are paying for a support contract, which is 20 percent of the price, but because the licenses are perpetual, I think the pricing is very reasonable."
"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."
"The only problem with the pricing of Windward is the limitation on the number of reports generated. It is costly in that sense. If you want to increase, you have to pay more, based on the number of reports generated per day. It is not the same with Crystal Reports. With the latter, you buy a license at one point in time and that's it."
"Windward is very expensive when the volume of documents being generated is low and it is cheap when the volume is high."
"Pricing is something I complain about. Production pricing is okay, but for a testing environment the pricing looks a bit high to me."
"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."
"We negotiated our prices many years ago, and while they go up a little bit here and there, they've been pretty steady."
"I can't advise anybody about pricing and licensing, but it was competitive. A lot of things we did look at were all volume-based, so it was a case of you buy a license to generate this many reports a year, and that's not something that I'm particularly interested in because it doesn't give you any idea - if we have future growth, or if we have a lean year - for budgeting reasons it's more difficult. With Windward it's a straight out license fee, whether we generate one page or we generate a million, it makes no difference."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
11%
Computer Software Company
11%
Comms Service Provider
9%
University
7%
Marketing Services Firm
16%
Manufacturing Company
13%
Financial Services Firm
7%
Healthcare Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business20
Midsize Enterprise4
Large Enterprise8
 

Questions from the Community

What needs improvement with Plotly?
The main improvement I can think of is that while creating charts, it gives you a certain format of how it could look. If you want to create something extra and go more vivid and creative with how ...
What is your primary use case for Plotly?
We use Plotly Dash Enterprise mainly for creating dashboards using Python. With Plotly's support of Python, it helps us to develop interactive dashboards according to the customer use case and the ...
What advice do you have for others considering Plotly?
It's a great tool to incorporate in your organization to develop dashboards that help your analytics team derive better decisions and generate more business profits. It gives you much more control ...
Ask a question
Earn 20 points
 

Also Known As

No data available
Windward, Windward Studios
 

Overview

 

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
Find out what your peers are saying about Plotly Dash Enterprise vs. Windward Core and other solutions. Updated: March 2026.
885,311 professionals have used our research since 2012.