What is a bar chart race?
A bar chart race is an animated bar chart that turns changing rankings into a race. Each bar represents a participant, such as a country, team, or brand, and grows or shrinks as the timeline progresses. It's what makes racing charts easy to follow: trends and competition become clear at a glance, without reading through a table of numbers.
With Flourish, you can create bar chart races in minutes — no coding needed. Upload your data, customize colors and fonts, add captions or images, and share responsive charts that work beautifully on any screen.
USE CASES
Bring data stories to life with animated bar charts
Show how leaders emerge, challengers rise, and rankings change as your dataset plays out over time.
Show competition in action
Highlight how teams, brands, or people rise and fall in rankings over time.
Compare growth across categories
Visualize how values change across industries, regions, or groups.
Reveal long-term shifts
Turn long datasets into engaging animated narratives that are easy to understand and share.
FEATURES
Everything you need to create online bar chart races
Powerful features that make data visualization easy and beautiful
No coding required
Build interactive bar chart races in minutes, without writing a single line of code.
Interactive elements
Add filters, captions, and clickable legends so viewers can explore the story.
Responsive design
Charts automatically adapt to any screen size for a smooth viewing experience.
Customizable timeline
Use a time slider or even switch the timeline to a line chart for extra context.
Add images and captions
Include icons, flags, or photos alongside bars and explain key moments with timed captions.
Bar chart race (with line chart)
Additionally display a timeline with a line chart below your race.
RESOURCES
Data visualization resources
Tips, guides, and resources to make your interactive bar chart race even more effective
5 animated charts ideas
Use animated charts to make your data more engaging and easier to follow
Learn more →
Frequently asked questions
Bar chart races are a popular form of data visualization that can be used to show changes in data over time. In a bar chart race, each bar visualizes a different ‘participant’ in the race (country, person, brand) and extends or retracts in length over time, based on the value it represents at any given moment.
Thanks to its interactivity and animation, this chart type has been exceedingly popular in the latest years. You can often spot a racing chart on the web and on social media, successfully engaging audiences and making complex data more digestible.
With Flourish, you can create a racing bar chart for free by simply uploading a spreadsheet. You can add images which can display at the end of the bars or at the start, add captions, customize the color palette and fonts of your visualization, as well as add controls which allows the user to show the smallest values in your dataset as opposed to the largest.
The color legend of this template is also interactive, which makes it easy to filter out categories from your visualization. The counter in the corner automatically sums up all values in your chart, which makes it convenient to check the total at any given time.
Last but not least, the timeline at the bottom can be customized to show a line chart, which further emphasizes the growth of your values. In a Flourish story mode, you can choose to only play a specific timeframe of your visualization – see an example below and learn how to do this in our help doc.
Bar chart races need cumulative data to work properly. Each row should represent a participant, and each subsequent column should show that participant’s value at a specific point in time (e.g. by year or month). These values are then animated across the timeline to create the “race.”
For a detailed walkthrough, check out our help doc.
Flourish offers a free plan that’s perfect for exploring interactive data storytelling. You’ll get access to the full range of visualization types available in Flourish (including Bar Chart Race), unlimited projects, full privacy for your unpublished work, plus helpful support resources.
If you’re an individual creating presentations and reports, our Presenter plan might be the right fit. It includes access to the Flourish app within Canva, along with image and SVG export options for your visualizations.
And if you’re ready to create fully branded visuals without attribution, collaborate across teams, connect your systems via API, and unlock advanced storytelling features like scrollytelling, our premium plans are designed for you. Reach out to our team to find the best option for your business.
Yes! On a Presenter, Publisher, or Enterprise plan, you can download your finished projects as PNG, JPEG, or (in most cases) SVG files. These formats are perfect for adding charts to reports, presentations, social posts, or anywhere you need a static version of your visualization.
We also have a help doc on how to create looping, autoplaying Flourish stories – a great alternative to GIFs if you need an animated visual for your website.
