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Add to SafariWhen comparing Fabric.js vs D3.js, 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 Fabric.js is ranked 8th. 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 Out of the box Node.js support
Fabric supports node.js, and has an npm package available for server side rendering with all the dependencies handled for you. This allows you to provide graceful degradation for image fallbacks to canvas or SVG content.
Pro Vector focused API
Drawing objects in fabric are vector focused, so everything is easily transformable. It makes it easy to create complex pathed shapes, add gradients, or filters. Although fabric is great for vector rendering, it also has image support as well.
Pro Outputs to canvas and SVG and JSON
When it comes to format compatibility, Fabric is the best, with the ability to output to Canvas, SVG, and JSON. SVG provides backwards compatibility for older browsers, and JSON allows you to store rendered output for later use.
Pro Great interaction with SVG, excellent coding
If you are about to customize the library to your needs, this is the project of choice! Great programming work!
Pro Good support for SVG multi-line text
Allows creating multi-line text that can even be interactively edited by user interaction.
Pro Browser only version now available
If the node-canvas dependency is a problem you can now look for npm install fabric@x.y.z-browser
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.
Cons
Con No front-end only version via Node
NPM package has major dependencies.
Con A little bit less support for Angular.js
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.
