How do I embed a Datawrapper chart in a Substack post?
Quick answer
Datawrapper is one of the few chart tools Substack officially supports as an embed. Create your chart in Datawrapper, click Publish, copy the external embed URL, and paste it on its own line in your Substack draft. Substack auto-renders it. For finance-specific charts Datawrapper can't make, export from Quadesto as a high-resolution PNG and upload as an image.
The Datawrapper-Substack workflow
Datawrapper is the most popular chart-embedding tool among newsletter writers. If you're using Substack, here's the exact workflow for embedding a Datawrapper chart:
1. Go to datawrapper.de and create your chart. Paste your data, choose a chart type, customize the appearance.
2. Click 'Publish' in the top right.
3. In the publish dialog, copy the 'External embed URL' (not the iframe code — Substack needs the URL, not the HTML).
4. In your Substack draft, paste the URL on its own line.
5. Substack auto-detects the Datawrapper URL and renders the chart as a rich embed.
That's it. The chart will be interactive — readers can hover for values and the chart resizes responsively.
What Datawrapper does well
Datawrapper deserves its reputation. The editor is clean and intuitive. The output is publication-ready — no fiddling with CSS or JavaScript. The free tier is genuinely generous: unlimited charts, unlimited embeds, full chart type library.
For general-purpose data visualization — bar charts, line charts, scatter plots, choropleth maps — Datawrapper is hard to beat. Major newsrooms (NYT, Reuters, WaPo) use it daily.
Where Datawrapper falls short for finance writers
If you write about financial markets, you'll hit Datawrapper's limitations quickly:
No candlestick charts. The most fundamental financial chart type doesn't exist in Datawrapper. You can make a line chart of close prices, but not a proper OHLC candlestick with volume.
No options visualization. No vol surfaces, vol smiles, options chain tables, or Greeks displays. If you cover derivatives, Datawrapper has nothing for you.
No yield curves. You can plot Treasury rates as a line chart, but Datawrapper won't interpolate the curve correctly (no monotone convex, no spline fitting). The chart will have kinks at each data point.
No computation. Want to add a 20-day moving average? Calculate a yield spread? Compute an RSI? You need to do it in Excel first, then paste the computed data into Datawrapper. No in-tool computation.
No AI. Every chart requires manual configuration. No automatic data type detection, no chart type suggestion, no natural language refinement.
When you need more than Datawrapper
For the specific use cases that Datawrapper can't serve — candlesticks, yield curves, vol surfaces, options analytics, computed indicators — Quadesto picks up where Datawrapper leaves off.
The embed workflow is identical: create the chart, copy the URL, paste in Substack. But the chart types available are fundamentally different. Quadesto is built for finance; Datawrapper is built for general publishing. Both are excellent at what they do.
Many finance writers use both: Datawrapper for basic charts (market cap comparisons, revenue trends, geographic breakdowns) and Quadesto for finance-specific visualization (yield curves, vol analysis, rate probabilities).