Good methods for creating high quality scatterplots
I'm not sure this question fits well here on academia.SE, but if you want free, beautiful, and powerful, it'll be hard to beat R. See e.g.

http://www.slideshare.net/dataspora/a-survey-of-r-graphics

http://www.sthda.com/english/wiki/ggplot2-scatter-plots-quick-start-guide-r-software-and-data-visualization