Tag: software

Sankey Diagrams in Data Analysis Tools

If you are using a big data analysis tool aka business intelligence (BI) visualization tool you are probably aware that many of them have added distribution diagrams (relationship diagrams), a specific subtype of Sankey diagrams. However, it is not always straight forward to produce them.

Qlik Sense users who need some background before producing their own graphs of this type might want to check out this blog article on ‘Visualizing Flows with Sankey’ on the Qlik blog. Or this one from the Qlik healthcare user group.


Users of Tableau can get an idea of how to do Sankey diagrams from this Tableau community board post and some detail background from Yoshi Arakawa’s blog here. I have mentioned the Sigmoid curves here on the blog in a December 2018 post.


Microsoft Power BI also has category relationship diagrams, although they might “not [be] available by default in Power BI Desktop”. The post by Siddharth Mehta at MSSQLtips.com shows the 16 steps to produce your Sankey diagram from data managed in Power BI.


All three visualizations look very similar. This is because all three tools base their implementation on Mike Bostock’s d3-Sankey package.

Sankey Flow Show

A new web-based Sankey tool, Sankey Flow Show, is available from German software maker THORTEC Software. It promises “attractive flow diagrams made in minutes”.

And indeed the tool is rich in features and design options: Different node elements, shadow effect for arrows (called ‘connections’), toggle constant/Sankey connections style, and customizable data input are some of the highlights.

Here is one of the Sankey diagrams produced with Sankey Flow Show. See more samples here. You can sign-up for a free trial to check it out yourself.


I have added Sankey Flow Show to the list of Sankey software.

Sankey Diagram Video Production Line

Just discovered this new Sankey diagram video via e!Sankey Forum. Apparently just meant as a a show case for the possibilities offered by the e!Sankey software development kit (SDK).

We can see mass flows on a production line with two machines feeding ‘Item A’ and ‘Item B’ into the main production line.

These seem to be hourly flow values over a 30-hour time span. There are some red warnings indicating low buffer, and even one or two times when the production runs dry. Interesting…

Found that there are some more (educational) videos on youtube now that deal with Sankey diagrams.

Wikibudgets: Free Sankey Builder Web App

Steve from wikibudgets.org posted a comment calling attention to a new free web app they have launched on their website.

This is a straight-forward drawing tool for simple left-to-right distribution diagrams. On the website just pick a node (called “budget” there) and an arrow (called “transfer”), add amount, choose color. The elements can be dragged freely in the browser window. Easy zooming with mouse wheel or double-click on an element. The ‘Save Image’ command from the browser’s context menu lets you store a PNG file.

The motto of wikibudgets.org is to “Visualise public budgets. Rationalise politics. Tackle Corruption. Eliminate waste. Fight bureaucracy.” The Sankey diagrams everyone can produce with this tool aim at visualizing financial transfers in US$.

According to the wikibudgets.org blog this is a first early release of the open source Sankey app for desktop UI. Touch friendly editing for mobile devices is under development.

Added to the list of Sankey software.

Integration of Sankey diagrams, e!Sankey

Found out via the news feed from ifu Hamburg, maker of e!Sankey that they have released an SDK based on e!Sankey that allows software makers to integrate Sankey visualizations into their application.

Two main features help to achieve this: (1) building Sankey diagrams from an XML file that contains structural and layout information (2) feeding values into a Sankey diagram template by reading ID/value pairs from a CSV file.

Simple Diagrams with SankeyMATIC

Steve Bogart has released a website for autoMATICally creating simple horizontal distribution diagrams. No need to install a tool, just go to sankeymatic.com and enter your values. On each line define source node, quantity in square brackets, destination node (e.g. “Budget [450] Housing” or “Budget [300] Food”). Columns and bands will be created automatically.

A number of options can be set, such as colors, spacing and labels. Finally, when you have created your diagram you can download it directly (three sizes/resolutions available).

This simple online tool is based on the open source tool D3.js and its Sankey library.

Try it out yourself!

I have added SankeyMATIC to the list of software tools for Sankey diagrams (seriously thinking about creating an own group for d3.js-based products).

Sankey Diagram using TikZ

Over at the TeX – LaTeX Stack Exchange (a Q&A site for users of TeX and LaTeX) this article explains “How to draw a Sankey Diagram using TikZ”. Okay, its a bit techie, but the results look good.

The original poster wanted to know how to draw a Sankey diagram using the TikZ package (TikZ is a “higher-level drawing language built on top of the PGF graphics framework”).

User Paul Gaborit came up with this example using TikZ and building his own sankeydiagram environment

The interesting thing is that flows can fork and join, and that there is a check that the sum of quantities must be equal to the quantity of sankey node to fork.

This is how the the original sample Sankey diagram looks like with this solution.

Very nice result. So for those out there used to working with TeX/LaTeX out this is actually a good solution.

Don’t miss to read the comments too (there’s one pointing to an alternative (Matplotlib and Sankey module).