When comparing AnyChart vs D3.js, the Slant community recommends D3.js for most people. In the question“What are the best JavaScript charting libraries? ” D3.js is ranked 2nd 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.
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro A lot of different data formats
xml, json, csv, js api.
Pro Lots of chart types
Including bar, line, area, scatter, waterfall, spline, funnel, bubble, polar, column, columnrange, pie, box plot, angular gauge, areasplinerange, and other types of "basic" charts (AnyChart); Gantt charts (AnyGantt); Maps (AnyMap), and Financial/Stock charts (AnyStock).
Pro Independent from other js libraries
no jQuery or libraries.
Pro IE6+ support, along with mobile browsers
Pro Experienced team and long product history
AnyChart is on the market since 2003.
Pro Events support
Pro Flexibility
Any part of chart can be adjusted.
Pro A lot of integration templates
Technical integration templates for many popular stacks.
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 Proprietary
Con Expensive
Once you use it on anything but a site, it rapidly gets expensive.
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.
