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Add to SafariWhen comparing D3.js vs Famous, the Slant community recommends D3.js for most people. In the question“What are the best JavaScript animation frameworks or libraries?” D3.js is ranked 2nd while Famous is ranked 5th. 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 3D physics engine
Famous offers a 3D engine through via WebGL. This engine is very similar to those found in videogame engines.
Pro Amazing performance
Famous makes it possible to create animations through DOM and WebGL that are up to 60FPS. In other words, the Famous engine is able to create native animations inside the web browser.
Pro Open Source
Famous is a free and open source project released under the MIT License.
Pro SEO friendly
Since Famous renders on DOM (as well as WebGL) it's SEO friendly, because web crawlers can read everything that's rendered on the DOM.
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 Dead project
Famous has been abandoned and will not get updates or bug fixes anymore.
