What are the best JavaScript libraries for creating visualisations of data as charts/graphs?

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score 50 · Accepted Answer

D3.js

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Top Pro

Great for highly interactive scenes

D3.js offers incredible levels of interactivity. See More

Top Con

High 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

Robert Petty's Experience

Steep learning curve but very customizable See More

Top Pro

Huge number of examples online

Most of them by the author, but there's also a great community writing plugins and more examples 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

Easily the most versatile of the JS libraries for manipulating data on the DOM

Top Con

Requires a lot of work to setup

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 Con

In fact no API for events

Top Pro

SVG Support

Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) provides resolution-independent, vector-based, animatable graphics. See More

Top Con

Slow on complex charts

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

Easy to implement animations

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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The Best 1 of 21 OptionsWhy?

My Recommendation for D3.js

My Recommendation for D3.js

Great for highly interactive scenes

High learning curve

Huge number of examples online

"Selections" are elegant, but somewhat hard to grok

Easily the most versatile of the JS libraries for manipulating data on the DOM

Requires a lot of work to setup

Doesn't require a proprietary framework

In fact no API for events

SVG Support

Slow on complex charts

Very flexible join paradigm

Easy to implement animations

Backwards compatible

20 Other Options Considered

My Recommendation for Chart.js

My Recommendation for Chart.js

Clear documentation

Limited features and chart types

Tiny size that makes it very fast

Some bugs in js

Many types of charts provided

No interactivity

My Recommendation for Plotly

My Recommendation for Plotly

Can use the javascript library directly or via several language bindings including R, Python, Julia and others

3D surfaces and other advanced plotting

Plotly.js is open source

Uses d3.js and stack.gl

My Recommendation for Shield UI Charts

My Recommendation for Shield UI Charts

Many chart types available

Commercial

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

Good documentation

Interactive charts

Out of the box pan-and-zoom

Supports combining different charts

My Recommendation for Raphael

My Recommendation for Raphael

It's not built for making charts

Every object is interactive with events

Built in animations

Works with older browsers

My Recommendation for CanvasJS Charts

My Recommendation for CanvasJS Charts

Works across devices and browsers

No drill-down

High performance

Non-interactive

Free for non-commercial use (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 License)

Cost for commercial use

Start-up friendly

Good commercial pricing

Supports 24 different chart types

My Recommendation for AnyChart

My Recommendation for AnyChart

Experienced team and long product history

Proprietary

Lots of chart types

Expensive

Independent from other js libraries

A lot of different data formats

Events support

Flexibility

IE6+ support, along with mobile browsers

A lot of integration templates

My Recommendation for Highcharts

My Recommendation for Highcharts

Flexible and powerful

Commercial

Clean, neat design

Pretty basic feature wise without plugins

Lot of chart types

Primitive API and features

Wide browser compatibility

My Recommendation for amCharts

My Recommendation for amCharts