What is the best alternative to Paper.js?
Pro Easiest to learn to obtain high grade results
In a few days any body can understand extremely complex figures in a few minutes.
Pro Accessible documentation
Reference documentation and lots of examples are available directly on the website.
Pro Great community
p5 users benefit from the Processing community's 15+ years of growth and discovery. Processing code can easily be converted to p5.
Pro Convenient API
Clear and concise API with chaining support.
Pro Virtual DOM
Rapid drawing. Only what is necessary is drawn.
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.
Pro Will be familiar to ActionScript developers
Pixi.js uses a code structure that's very similar to ActionScript.
Con Not a complete solution
Pixi only provides the renderer.
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.
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.
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 dem...
Con Complicated, confusing documentation
The documentation is often not clear and lacks practical examples.
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.
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
Pro Backed by Adobe
Adobe is backing the development of snap.svg
Pro Features
Supports the newest SVG features like masking, clipping, patterns, full gradients, groups, and more
Con Not actively developed
During 2016 was few updates, more updates in 2017
Con Spotty exporting
Exporting doesn't work well (if at all sometimes) with SVGs exported from anything other than Adobe products.
Con Weak documentation
Explanations provided in the documentation can often be unclear, with some features missing from the documentation all together.
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 equival...
Pro SVG native
The first and most accomplished SVG native library, 100% cross-platform compatible.
Con Commercial license
PERGOLA does not offer a free version. The price for a single developer to use PERGOLA is 400 €.
Pro Works with all of the common browsers
That includes: Chrome, Safari, Opera, Firefox and IE 10+
Pro Pretty lightweight
Only 9.43KB.
Pro Very simple
It's one of the easiest drawing libraries to learn.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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 porti...
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.
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.
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.
Con No front-end only version via Node
NPM package has major dependencies.
Con A little bit less support for Angular.js
https://github.com/michaeljcalkins/angular-fabric
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.
Pro Many chart types available
There are more than 20 types of charts available for use.
Pro Good documentation
Each of the available charts has documentation and guides available for every different implementation (JavaScript, ASP.NET etc.)
Con Commercial
Pay by developer starting from 349$.
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, poi...
Pro Fallback canvas rendering
Three.js offers a canvas renderer as a fallback when WebGL is not available.
Pro Well documented
The documentation is detailed, providing clear explanations and code samples of the various features. There are also hundreds of examples available.
Con Poor garbage collection
Memory is quite slow to free up with Three.js, causing issues with the performance of the project. Note: A lot of work on garbage collection has been done in the last couple of releases, so this may no longer be an issue.
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.
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.
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.
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, so...
Pro Lightweight
18kb minified.
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