When comparing Shield UI Charts 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 Shield UI Charts is ranked 9th. 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 Many chart types available
There are more than 20 types of charts available for use.
Pro Wrappers for ASP.NET, ASP.NET MVC and Apache Wicket
Each chart can be implemented to ASP.NET and ASP.NET MVC applications, with detailed documentation and guides for each.
Pro Good documentation
Each of the available charts has documentation and guides available for every different implementation (JavaScript, ASP.NET etc.)
Pro Interactive charts
The charting widget is built to facilitate client side interactions and notifications.
Pro Out of the box pan-and-zoom
Zoom-in on specific points of interest on the graph with the mouse – a single property allows this out-of-the-box.
Pro Supports combining different charts
You can combine different charts (they can be of the same type or even different types of charts) to display data correlations.
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 Commercial
Pay by developer starting from 349$.
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.