Plotly vs Windward Core comparison

Plotly and Windward Studios are both solutions in the Reporting category. Plotly is ranked #19 with an average rating of 7.7, while Windward Studios is ranked #24. Plotly holds a 1.3% mindshare in RT, compared to Windward Studios’s 0.8% 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

622 Views
101 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

Windward Core

Read 36 Windward Core reviews

536 Views
99 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: June 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Plotly vs. Windward Core

June 2025

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Helped 860,592 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

19th

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

24th

Average Rating

8.8

Reviews Sentiment

7.6

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Document Generation Tools (1st)

Mindshare comparison

As of July 2025, in the Reporting category, the mindshare of Plotly is 1.3%, up from 1.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Windward Core is 0.8%, up from 0.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Reporting

Featured Reviews

VenkateshJuloori

Founder & CEO at Ira

A flexible tool that offers an open-source version

It is a scalable solution. Scalability-wise, I rate the solution a nine to ten out of ten. In my company, there are around five resources that use the product. My company's clients use the product a lot on a daily basis. I use the product twice a week in my company before I get any call from our clients.

Read full review

Christopher Heinz

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.

Read full review

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"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."

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

"Another thing our clients absolutely love is the ability to design templates within the Microsoft Office suite, because of how simple it is. They're building off of something that's familiar. When they can build off of that feature, on top of something that's very familiar, that's a plus for them."

"Managing templates through MS Word, as non technical users can manage output."

"One of the things they added in the last two or three years is PODs, Portable Object Doclets. One of our clients said they wanted to use PODs. They're a good way to make some constructs modular and keep things in one place."

"Technical support is very good. They reply immediately and follow-up with any questions."

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

"The integration with MS Office is an advantage, creating a better user experience."

"We ended up going with Windward for the level of support we got from them during our proof of concept."

"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."

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."

"It would be nice to have a black-and-white, ideal setup for servers, to maximize capabilities. We went through a lot of scenarios to get something that is scalable. An ideal AWS-package server setup could have saved us a lot of time. But I understand this is very company specific."

"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."

"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."

"About six months ago, we raised the possibility of improving the way they manage the HTML 5. Sometimes, when you insert a lot of data in the data source, you get an error because it is not managing HTML 5 features well. I believe they have addressed this in later versions of their product."

"It needs better support for upgrades and more control over layout of elements. Upgrades tend to break existing output. Elements do not position where expected due to insertion of blank lines and page breaks. It takes time to fix these through trial and error."

"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."

"It needs the ability to drill down in a single report (i.e., interactive) into data."

"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."

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."

"Pricing is something I complain about. Production pricing is okay, but for a testing environment the pricing looks a bit high to me."

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

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

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

"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."

"The cost is reasonable."

"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."

"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."

More Windward Core pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

17%

Manufacturing Company

11%

Computer Software Company

Comms Service Provider

Financial Services Firm

19%

Computer Software Company

11%

Real Estate/Law Firm

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.

See all answers

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Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Reporting

June 2025

Download Plotly product report

Buyer's Guide

Windward Core

June 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

June 2025

Free Report: Plotly vs. Windward Core

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

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