Questions
Now that Google Image Charts are deprecated and only have a year or two left before they can shut it off. Are there any other options out there for creating image based charts (as opposed to JS-based charts)?
Background
There are plentiful solutions for creating charts if you have JS as an option. Visualforce has it's own charts, you can use the Google Charts API, but if you need to include the chart in a merge document or a pdf rendered visualforce page you can't use anything javascript based. I've loved Google Charts even though they aren't always the prettiest, but they've been deprecated and I need to figure out a replacement. So far I've been unable to google anything that's not javascript based. Any suggestions?
Best Answer
As said in comments, ChartURL is not a real drop-in replacement to Google Image Charts.
However there is actually **Image-Charts a fully compatible replacement for Google Image Charts.
The only required change to VisualForce scripts is to replace
https://chart.googleapis.com/chart
byhttps://image-charts.com/chart
.Bonus it even supports animated charts through gif generation: