When comparing Raphael vs PERGOLA, the Slant community recommends Raphael for most people. In the question“What are the best JavaScript drawing libraries?” Raphael is ranked 5th while PERGOLA is ranked 25th. 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 HTML
Pergola runs seamlessly in an HTML environment (option in configuration file). All the examples are provided both as SVG standalone and embedded in HTML, and are strictly equal.
Besides its universal Node Helper (http://www.svgmagazine.com/jul2011/dom-helper.html) Pergola also provides the equivalent for building HTML nodes and <foreignObject> HTML nodes.
Pro SVG native
The first and most accomplished SVG native library, 100% cross-platform compatible.
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 Commercial license
PERGOLA does not offer a free version. The price for a single developer to use PERGOLA is 400 €.