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When comparing D3.js vs Highcharts, the Slant community recommends D3.js for most people. In the question“What are the best JavaScript drawing libraries?” D3.js is ranked 1st while Highcharts is ranked 18th. The most important reason people chose D3.js is:
D3.js is a very popular tool with an active community, resulting in plenty of learning resources and fast responses to questions.
Question Ranking
Pros
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.
Pro Versatile library for manipulating data on the DOM
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.
Pro Great for highly interactive scenes
D3.js offers incredible levels of interactivity.
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.
Pro Good documentation
Very handy with examples and explanations.
Pro Excellent browser support
Highcharts supports all modern browsers (including IE6 and up), iOS and Android.
Pro Large and active community
Highcharts has a large and supportive community, resulting in a fast response from both stack overflow and the Highcharts forum.
Pro Lots of good examples
The site has a selection of good examples that will help you get started quickly.
Pro Supports multiple Y axes
Important for trend correlation, eg. comparing number of clicks to sale amounts. Not same scales / units.
Pro Library to support Microsoft .NET
Compatable with .NET framework 4+, can develop graphs from server side for ASP .NETand ASP .NET MVC applications.
Cons
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.
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.
Con Commercial
Highcharts is not free for commercial projects, with a starting price of US$590 for Single Developer + Maintenance & Support
Con The examples are not that great
For instance, example's JsFiddle may get stalled when loading.
