Browser-based platforms that absolutely wreck your RAM
Visme, Piktochart, and (worst offender) Canva — they all render like they’re trying to heat the Earth’s core using your Chrome tab.
If you’ve got more than 6 charts on-screen, Canva’s dynamic interface lags so badly, you’ll start questioning whether your internet is down. It’s not. It’s just GPU cry-screaming.
Compressed tab memory in Chrome suspends your interactive elements mid-edit. You’ll come back after switching tabs and find chart labels reset to lorem ipsum.
One time, a zig-zag connector line I had painstakingly arranged in a process flow reset into an MS Paint-level squiggle — because I dared to zoom out.
These platforms auto-save like it’s 2008 — on a timer, not on change. If you reposition five elements and close the tab in frustration, good luck.
Disable all memory-leaky extensions before opening any of these sites. Especially anything that injects CSS per domain — one rogue style tag from a dark mode extension nuked the color palette from one of my charts and it saved like that.
Chart generation tools that silently butcher your data formatting
Infogram and Venngage will happily auto-format numbers into abbreviated currency — because it assumes you’re visualizing stock prices instead of disability statistics.
CSV imports randomly drop leading zeroes, unless you preformat your data as text. That one took me an hour to figure out, after my ZIP code map turned into a weird incomplete scatter plot across the Midwest.
Legend truncation is rarely documented. In Piktochart, your category label gets cut after 15 characters — no warning, no tooltip. It’ll just say “Quarterly Sale…” and nothing else.
Data updates on linked Google Sheets lag up to 10 minutes, but the dashboard reports “synced”. I once changed a dataset during a client call, only to have them ask why our launch counts dropped by half. They hadn’t — it was old data pretending to be fresh.
Platform-specific limitations nobody mentions until you hit them
Free tier lock-in: You start building infographics vertically, get deep into layout, and only discover horizontal export is Pro-only after an hour of formatting.
Some platforms (especially Easil) won’t let you group charts with text blocks like regular elements. They treat charts like volatile widgets — you can drag one, but group alignment with a text header? Nope.
Custom fonts are often image-rendered in export. Looks fine in preview, but turns to mush in PDFs — and you can’t select the text because it’s rasterized. Guess who learned that delivering training slides to a government client?
Most builders treat color palettes globally, not per-element. That means tweaking one highlight color for Section A wrecks the entire flowchart in Section D if you’re not paying attention.
Most don’t respect SVG layering properly — making you think your network diagram looks fine until exporting, where half the arrows are hidden behind labels.
The real limits of ‘interactive’ charts on infographic builders
When Venngage says “interactive chart,” it really just means hover-tooltips. You can’t link out, embed controls, or even toggle series on/off.
I tested 6 different builders and only one let me embed a working iframe inside a node. Even then, the iframe wouldn’t resize responsively, breaking mobile view entirely.
Visme lets you assign web URLs to shapes, but the link area doesn’t apply to the shape — only to a pixel box surrounding it, so oval buttons don’t fire correctly if you click the edge.
Piktochart’s “interactive map” tool lets you color regions based on data, yes — but county-level mapping? Not supported. It’s just continent > country > *shrug*.
Things that feel broken but are just terrible UX decisions
Piktochart disables the Export button if you have one chart widget unconnected from data. Nothing tells you why. I had to inspect the console to see a warning message that never showed up in UI.
Color selectors randomly default to HEX input even when using prebuilt color themes — causes mismatches unless you realize every shape except titles respects the theme.
Venngage mobile preview shows text breaks prettily — but those aren’t real line breaks. They’re visual line wraps, meaning your exported image may have rogue long lines.
Charts often reset axis min/max values if you copy them to a new slide — one Visme heatmap went from a red gradient to all green because its value scaling reset to auto and bottomed out hard.
Shortlist of platforms that don’t instantly suck*
*With caveats so huge they might as well be platform features.
Flourish: Genuinely powerful for data mapping, but deeply opinionated. Nested data structures can make or break your visuals — and if your JSON breaks, good luck finding where.
Datawrapper: Probably the cleanest line/bar map output, but no real infographic structure support. You can’t wrap charts into a multi-page story unless you Frankenstein a web embed manually.
Infogram: Decent interactivity at first, but embedding into client sites spawns unreadable `
