12 best alternatives to Paper.js as of 2018 - Slant

Pixi.js

Top Pro

Supports WebGL w/ canvas fallback

Pixi is a WebGL renderer, but can fall back to canvas if WebGL is not supported or turned off. See More

Top Con

Not a complete solution

Pixi only provides the renderer. See More

Top Pro

Will be familiar to ActionScript developers

Pixi.js uses a code structure that's very similar to ActionScript. See More

18 3

Snap.svg

Top Pro

Written by a SVG Guru and pioneer

Dmitry Baranovskiy also wrote Raphael (project now owned by Sencha), this is the updated modern version of that library. Dmitry also is a champion directly affecting the future of SVG standards with W3C See More

Top Con

Not actively developed

During 2016 was few updates, more updates in 2017 See More

Top Pro

Backed by Adobe

Adobe is backing the development of snap.svg See More

Top Con

Spotty exporting

Exporting doesn't work well (if at all sometimes) with SVGs exported from anything other than Adobe products. See More

Top Pro

Features

Supports the newest SVG features like masking, clipping, patterns, full gradients, groups, and more See More

Top Con

Weak documentation

Explanations provided in the documentation can often be unclear, with some features missing from the documentation all together. See More

Top Pro

Pure SVG library

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9 2

Raphael

Top Pro

Works with older browsers

Because Raphael supports rendering VML + SVG, it is one of the few drawing libraries that is backwards compatible with older browsers that do not support canvas. See More

Top Con

Complicated, confusing documentation

The documentation is often not clear and lacks practical examples. See More

Top Pro

Built in animations

Several built-in animations (such as ways of easing) are provided for you out of the box, but Raphael also allows cubic beziers for more complicated easing functions. Any drawing object property can be modified making it similar to css animations in jQuery. See More

Top Con

Can be difficult to get support

Online communities for Raphael are small and inactive compared to other drawing libraries, and many issues opened on github are never addressed. See More

Top Pro

Every object is interactive with events

Everything that is drawn in Raphael is an object which means it is easy to manipulate any part of the rendered image after it is processed. It uses an event handler system for user inputs which makes it easy to learn for JavaScript developers used to event based libraries. An interactive chart demo. This style of handling objects makes Raphael a good fit for rendering interactive diagrams and charts that can also interact with other parts of the page. See More

Top Pro

Easy creation of charts with extension

gRaphael is a Raphael extension to help you easily create graphs and charts. See More

36 7

Three.js

Top Pro

Feature rich

Effects: Anaglyph, cross-eyed and parallax barrier. Scenes: add and remove objects at run-time; fog Cameras: perspective and orthographic; controllers: trackball, FPS, path and more Animation: armatures, forward kinematics, inverse kinematics, morph and keyframe Lights: ambient, direction, point and spot lights; shadows: cast and receive Materials: Lambert, Phong, Standard, smooth shading, textures, PBR and more Shaders: access to full OpenGL Shading Language (GLSL) capabilities: lens flare, depth pass and extensive post-processing library Objects: meshes, particles, sprites, lines, ribbons, bones and more - all with Level of detail Geometry: plane, cube, sphere, torus, 3D text and more; modifiers: lathe, extrude and tube Data loaders: binary, image, JSON and scene Utilities: full set of time and 3D math functions including frustum, matrix, quaternion, UVs and more Export and import: utilities to create Three.js-compatible JSON files from within: Blender, openCTM, FBX, Max, and OBJ Support: API documentation, public forum Examples: Over 150 files of coding examples plus fonts, models, textures, sounds and other support files See More

Top Con

Lack of versioning system means that the API changes frequently

Three.js releases a new revision about once a month, and the API can change at any time. This means that a lot of third party help found online is out of date. See More

Top Pro

Well documented

The documentation is detailed, providing clear explanations and code samples of the various features. There are also hundreds of examples available. See More

Top Con

Weak visual tools

Three.js has its own editor but it has been weakly developed. It does not support a lot of engine features. See More

Top Pro

Actively developed

Three.js has great project health, with activity on Github daily for bug fixes and new features. See More

Top Pro

Helpful and friendly community

Thanks to the recently introduced forum, it is easy to find a community of helpful developers. See More

Top Pro

Fallback canvas rendering

Three.js offers a canvas renderer as a fallback when WebGL is not available. See More

Top Pro

Support for most industry standard file formats

Three.js has importers for most of the industry standard files format (obj, mtl, fbx, 3ds, gltf, collada, babylon, playcanvas, stl, vrml, draco and many more), making it easy to author assets in your favourite modelling software and import them for use them in three.js. See More

Top Pro

Support for physically based rendering

With the introduction of the new MeshStandardMaterial, three.js support physically based rendering (PBR) out of the box allowing for real life quality material and lighting. See More

Top Pro

Support for special effects and postprocessing

Three.js support many special effects and post-processing filters including particles, lensflare, sprites, real time reflection and refraction and even area based lighting. See More

Top Pro

Hundreds of officially maintained plugins, extensions, control systems, importers, exporters and special effects

The core of the three.js system is kept to a minimum to reduce file size, however there are also hundreds of extensions maintained in the offical repo on github, along with many free textures, fonts and models. You can find them all here. See More

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20 5

PERGOLA

Top Con

Commercial license

PERGOLA does not offer a free version. The price for a single developer to use PERGOLA is 400 €. See More

Top Pro

HTML

Pergola runs seamlessly in an HTML environment (option in configuration file). All the examples are provided both as SVG standalone and embedded in HTML, and are strictly equal. Besides its universal Node Helper (http://www.svgmagazine.com/jul2011/dom-helper.html) Pergola also provides the equivalent for building HTML nodes and <foreignObject> HTML nodes. See More

Top Pro

SVG native

The first and most accomplished SVG native library, 100% cross-platform compatible. See More

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Shield UI Charts

Top Pro

Many chart types available

There are more than 20 types of charts available for use. See More

Top Con

Commercial

Pay by developer starting from 349$. See More

Top Pro

Wrappers for ASP.NET, ASP.NET MVC and Apache Wicket

Each chart can be implemented to ASP.NET and ASP.NET MVC applications, with detailed documentation and guides for each. See More

Top Pro

Good documentation

Each of the available charts has documentation and guides available for every different implementation (JavaScript, ASP.NET etc.) See More

Top Pro

Interactive charts

The charting widget is built to facilitate client side interactions and notifications. See More

Top Pro

Out of the box pan-and-zoom

Zoom-in on specific points of interest on the graph with the mouse – a single property allows this out-of-the-box. See More

Top Pro

Supports combining different charts

You can combine different charts (they can be of the same type or even different types of charts) to display data correlations. See More

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14 4

Fabric.js

Top Pro

Out of the box Node.js support

Fabric supports node.js, and has an npm package available for server side rendering with all the dependencies handled for you. This allows you to provide graceful degradation for image fallbacks to canvas or SVG content. See More

Top Con

No front-end only version via Node

NPM package has major dependencies. See More

Top Pro

Outputs to canvas and SVG and JSON

When it comes to format compatibility, Fabric is the best, with the ability to output to Canvas, SVG, and JSON. SVG provides backwards compatibility for older browsers, and JSON allows you to store rendered output for later use. See More

Top Con

A little bit less support for Angular.js

https://github.com/michaeljcalkins/angular-fabric See More

Top Pro

Vector focused API

Drawing objects in fabric are vector focused, so everything is easily transformable. It makes it easy to create complex pathed shapes, add gradients, or filters. Although fabric is great for vector rendering, it also has image support as well. See More

Top Pro

Great interaction with SVG, excellent coding

If you are about to customize the library to your needs, this is the project of choice! Great programming work! See More

Top Pro

Good support for SVG multi-line text

Allows creating multi-line text that can even be interactively edited by user interaction. See More

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25 7

D3.js

Top Con

Steep learning curve

The complexity and flexibility of D3.js results in it being a time-consuming tool to learn for many users. D3 is incredibly flexible; probably more so than any other JavaScript visualization library at the time of this posting. With that flexibility comes increased complexity. If you just want to create some quick charts you will get results faster with something else. See More

Top Pro

Large community

D3.js is a very popular tool with an active community, resulting in plenty of learning resources and fast responses to questions. See More

Top Con

"Selections" are elegant, but somewhat hard to grok

Selections are core to working with D3 beyond the basics. They're powerful and useful, but require new developers to get up to speed (e.g. set aside 30m to read and digest: https://github.com/mbostock/d3/wiki/Selections) and if used in the context of a larger application will result in a portion of the code using different patterns than the rest, requiring a translation layer in between. See More

Top Pro

Huge number of examples online

Most of the examples provided are by the author, but there's also a great community writing plugins and more examples. See More

Top Pro

Doesn't require a proprietary framework

D3's emphasis on web standards gives you the full capabilities of modern browsers without tying yourself to a proprietary framework. See More

Top Pro

Versatile library for manipulating data on the DOM

Top Pro

Very flexible join paradigm

Can be tricky at first, but once learned, data manipulation and binding can easily generate complex visualizations for massive amounts of data. See More

Top Pro

Great for highly interactive scenes

D3.js offers incredible levels of interactivity. See More

Top Pro

Backwards compatible

D3.js is intended for modern browsers, so supports IE9 and above (IE8 with an additional library) as well as all the other modern browsers. See More

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185 42

Anime.js

Top Pro

Works with all of the common browsers

That includes: Chrome, Safari, Opera, Firefox and IE 10+ See More

Top Pro

Pretty lightweight

Only 9.43KB. See More

Top Pro

Very simple

It's one of the easiest drawing libraries to learn. See More

1 1

Paths.js

Top Pro

Just helps building graphs, complements template engines or data-binding libraries

Can be used together with a template engine such as Mustache or Handlebars to display SVG graphics or instead of a static template engine, you can use a data binding or MVC/MV* library, such as Ractive.js, Angular, Mithril or Facebook React. See More

Top Pro

3 APIs for the price of one

3 APIs of increasing abstraction: Low-level (svg paths) Basic shapes (Polygon, Rectangle, Bezier, Sector, Connector etc..) Basic graphs (Pie, bar, stock, radar, tree, waterfall, sankey etc...) There is no magic, you can have as much control as you want on how you define your graphs, source code very readable. See More

Top Pro

Lightweight

18kb minified. See More

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