Add to Chrome
Add to Edge
Add to Firefox
Add to Opera
Add to Brave
Add to SafariWhen comparing Snap.svg 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 Snap.svg is ranked 7th. 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 Pure SVG library
Pro Written by a SVG Guru and pioneer
Dmitry Baranovskiy also wrote Raphael (project now owned by Sencha), this is the updated modern version of that library. Dmitry also is a champion directly affecting the future of SVG standards with W3C
Pro Backed by Adobe
Adobe is backing the development of snap.svg
Pro Features
Supports the newest SVG features like masking, clipping, patterns, full gradients, groups, and more
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 Not actively developed
During 2016 was few updates, more updates in 2017
Con Spotty exporting
Exporting doesn't work well (if at all sometimes) with SVGs exported from anything other than Adobe products.
Con Weak documentation
Explanations provided in the documentation can often be unclear, with some features missing from the documentation all together.
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.
