Forum Discussion
Advocate IHeat or contour map visual
Anyone have a nice solution for a heat map visual in Power BI? I find the heatmap settings on the default Azure Maps to be a bit lacking as it doesn't really reflect the density of points in an area. There used to be a very nice free visual literally called "Heatmap" but now you've to pay for a Bing Maps Enterprise key to use it. The "Data Map" visual also has a nice enough heatmap setting which I used to use with an Open Street Map base layer but now OSM keeps blocking access in PowerBI citing the tile usage policy.
Looking for suggestions, ideally free, or any indication that there's plans to improve the Azure map heatmap option.
Hi,
For a free option, ArcGIS Maps for Power BI (Esri's visual, built-in/free tier) has a solid heatmap layer that reflects point density properly, worth trying since it doesn't need Bing Enterprise or OSM tiles that keep getting blocked.
Another route, if you're comfortable with custom visuals, Deneb can render a proper density/contour heatmap using D3-style logic, more setup work but fully free and highly customizable, no dependency on any map tile provider's policy changes.
If this helped, feel free to give it a kudos or mark it as solution, helps others find it too.
4 Replies
- Prince0011
Solution Sage
Hi,
For a free option, ArcGIS Maps for Power BI (Esri's visual, built-in/free tier) has a solid heatmap layer that reflects point density properly, worth trying since it doesn't need Bing Enterprise or OSM tiles that keep getting blocked.
Another route, if you're comfortable with custom visuals, Deneb can render a proper density/contour heatmap using D3-style logic, more setup work but fully free and highly customizable, no dependency on any map tile provider's policy changes.
If this helped, feel free to give it a kudos or mark it as solution, helps others find it too.
am_nrThank you, I had no idea the ArcGIS Map had a free tier! I've clicked on it before but never bothered poking around in the settings long enough to find the heatmap option. This is much nicer than the Azure map, good enough for my purposes I think. Thanks again for your help.
Hi am_nr ,
Adding one more free option worth considering: a Python visual using Seaborn's kdeplot (kernel density estimate). Unlike a typical heatmap that blends colors based on point proximity, this calculates the actual statistical density distribution and renders true contour/isoline levels , closer to what you'd get from stat_density2d in R, but in Python.
import seaborn as sns
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
sns.kdeplot(x=dataset.Longitude, y=dataset.Latitude, cmap="Reds", fill=True, thresh=0.05, levels=20)
plt.show()
