Over the past year, I've worked on a couple of sites that needed a lot of graphs. The landscape of web friendly graphing software is pretty large and technically diverse. By far the best article I found on the topic was this one over at smashingmagazine.com. Rather than repeat their excellent survey, I'll just list the aspects of these packages that have really stuck with me.

What I wanted:

Good time plotting
Handle large datasets (>1000 points)
Interactivity, annotation (highlight interesting data points)
Smart labeling, range setting and defaults

What I found:

amcharts (12+ hours experience)
  Very impressive overall
  Depth + documentation = happy
  XML config file is huge (~500 lines!)
  Smart defaults, organized
  New to market (from 2007?)
  Responsive support

google charts (12+ hours experience)
  clean and readable
  fast
  good examples
  a bitch for anything complicated
  URL string API -- cool but hacky
  static image -- no interactivity
  gchartphp and pygooglechart -- very thin layers

fusioncharts (0.5 hours experience)
  Nicest animations
  Relatively expensive
  Popular choice -- active forums
  Documentation is too hard to search
  No 100% stacked line chart

Open Flash Chart (0.1 hours experience)
  feature-full
  ugly (why make the examples so f**cking ugly?)
  PHP API
 
plotr (0.1 hours experience)
  nice looking
  limited
 
PlotKit (0.1 hours experience)
  nice looking
  limited


Interesting but peripheral packages:

processing
  could this be the future?

timeplot
  specialized for time series
  impressive

matplotlib
  scientific plots... many more ways to visualize data

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