When comparing Raphael vs Three.js, the Slant community recommends Raphael for most people. In the question“What are the best JavaScript drawing libraries?” Raphael is ranked 5th while Three.js is ranked 14th. The most important reason people chose Raphael is:
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.
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Pros
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.
This style of handling objects makes Raphael a good fit for rendering interactive diagrams and charts that can also interact with other parts of the page.
Pro Easy creation of charts with extension
gRaphael is a Raphael extension to help you easily create graphs and charts.
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, point and spot lights; shadows: cast and receive
Materials: Lambert, Phong, Standard, smooth shading, textures, PBR and more
Shaders: access to full OpenGL Shading Language (GLSL) capabilities: lens flare, depth pass and extensive post-processing library
Objects: meshes, particles, sprites, lines, ribbons, bones and more - all with Level of detail
Geometry: plane, cube, sphere, torus, 3D text and more; modifiers: lathe, extrude and tube
Data loaders: binary, image, JSON and scene
Utilities: full set of time and 3D math functions including frustum, matrix, quaternion, UVs and more
Export and import: utilities to create Three.js-compatible JSON files from within: Blender, openCTM, FBX, Max, and OBJ
Support: API documentation, public forum
Examples: Over 150 files of coding examples plus fonts, models, textures, sounds and other support files
Pro Well documented
The documentation is detailed, providing clear explanations and code samples of the various features. There are also hundreds of examples available.
Pro Helpful and friendly community
Thanks to the recently introduced forum, it is easy to find a community of helpful developers.
Pro Support for physically based rendering
With the introduction of the new MeshStandardMaterial, three.js support physically based rendering (PBR) out of the box allowing for real life quality material and lighting.
Pro Support for most industry standard file formats
Three.js has importers for most of the industry standard files format (obj, mtl, fbx, 3ds, gltf, collada, babylon, playcanvas, stl, vrml, draco and many more), making it easy to author assets in your favourite modelling software and import them for use them in three.js.
Pro Actively developed
Three.js has great project health, with activity on Github daily for bug fixes and new features.
Pro Fallback canvas rendering
Three.js offers a canvas renderer as a fallback when WebGL is not available.
Pro Support for special effects and postprocessing
Three.js support many special effects and post-processing filters including particles, lensflare, sprites, real time reflection and refraction and even area based lighting.
Pro Hundreds of officially maintained plugins, extensions, control systems, importers, exporters and special effects
The core of the three.js system is kept to a minimum to reduce file size, however there are also hundreds of extensions maintained in the offical repo on github, along with many free textures, fonts and models. You can find them all here.
Pro Plenty of tutorials and examples
Three.js official documentation provides plenty of well-written examples with a wide variety of tutorials written by the community available that you can find by doing a google search.
Cons
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.
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.
