When comparing D3.js vs AnyChart, the Slant community recommends D3.js for most people. In the question“What are the best libraries for creating charts on websites?” D3.js is ranked 1st while AnyChart 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.
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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 Multiple supported data formats
Supports the Javascript API, XML, JSON, CSV.
Pro Extremely flexible and customizable
Any part of a chart can be changed and customized.
Pro Each chart element responds to user actions
Events can be distributed to chart elements which respond to user actions. Event listeners are simple JavaScript functions which are very easy to use and understand.
Pro Multiple plugins and integration templates are available
Plugins for AngularJS, Ember.js, jQuery, Meteor, Node.js, React: http://www.anychart.com/plugins
Technical integration templates and samples for all popular programming languages, frameworks and libraries, and databases: http://www.anychart.com/integrations/
Pro Full cross-browser support
Supports all browsers, including IE6+ along with mobile browsers.
Pro Open source
The open source code is hosted on GitHub under different licenses depending on the library.
Pro No dependencies
No jQuery or other libraries required.
Pro Long product history, experienced team
AnyChart has been operating from 2003 and the team is very experienced with a long history of releasing quality products.
Pro Detailed documentation and API reference
The documentation and API reference are very detailed and everything is explained in detail in a simple and clear way.
Pro A lot of supported chart types
Supports almost all chart types one could ever want. From the most common bar charts, area charts, and donut charts, to funnel charts, polar charts or Japanese Candlestick charts.
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.
