In our last post we discussed the boxplot of the distances to the sun for each of the eight planets in our solar system, as measured in astronomical units (AU; AU=1 is the average distance from the earth to the sun):
Box plots are a standard tool for exploratory data analysis, but they have two important limitations. First, the boxplot does not show the individual observations (other than the occasional values that fall outside of the whiskers). Second, the box plot only gives a hint as to how the data are distributed — detailed information on the distributional shape is missing. To overcome these limitations, Allen et al. (2021) suggested the raincloud plot, a plot that features not only the boxplot, but also the individual observations (i.e., the raindrops) and an estimate of the density (i.e., the cloud). JASP generally offers raincloud plots wherever it is useful. Particularly comprehensive is the “Raincloud plots” module under “Descriptives” (cf. Ott et al., 2025, and the associated blog post here). A few mouse clicks produce the following raincloud plot for the AU data:
It is immediately clear that the raincloud plot provides useful additional information compared to the boxplot. For instance, the raincloud plot immediately reveals that there are only a few observations, and that four planets are relatively close to the sun, yielding a distribution with right skew. The raincloud plot module in JASP allows the user considerable freedom to change the plot at will. Below is a screenshot of some of the input options:
Modern data visualization puts more emphasis on showing all of the data, and raincloud plots are one effective way to do so. I think it is unavoidable that raincloud plots will become increasingly popular in industrial quality control and gradually replace the simple box plot.
References
Allen, M., Poggiali, D., Whitaker, K., Marshall, T. R., van Langen, J., & Kievit, R. A. (2021). Raincloud plots: a multi-platform tool for robust data visualization [version 2; peer review: 2 approved]. Wellcome open research, 4:63. https://doi.org/10.12688/wellcomeopenres.15191.2.
Ott, V. L., van den Bergh, D., Boutin, B., van Doorn, J., Bartoš, F., Judd, N., van Langen, J., Korthals, L., Kievit, R., Groot, L., & Wagenmakers, E.-J. (2025). Informative data visualization with raincloud plots in JASP. Behavior Research Methods, 57, 265. An accompanying YouTube tutorial is here.
Authors
Eric-Jan Wagenmakers (CEO) and the JASP Services BV Team
