C3.js VS Plotly

Compare C3.js VS Plotly and see what are their differences

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C3.js

D3-based reusable chart library that enables deeper integration of charts into web applications

Plotly

Low-Code Data Apps

Landing page //
2019-01-08

Landing page //
2023-07-31

C3.js

Website: c3js.org
Pricing URL: -
$ Details

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Plotly

Website: plotly.com
Pricing URL: Official Plotly Pricing
$ Details: -

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C3.js features and specs

Easy to Use
C3.js provides a simple and convenient way to create charts. Its API is designed to be easy to understand, making it accessible for both novice and experienced developers.
Customization
The library offers a high degree of customization options, allowing developers to tweak the appearance and behavior of charts to meet specific requirements.
Integration with D3.js
C3.js is built on top of D3.js, enabling it to leverage the extensive capabilities of D3.js while providing a more user-friendly API.
Responsiveness
C3.js charts are responsive by default, meaning they automatically adjust to different screen sizes, which is essential for modern web applications.
Documentation
Comprehensive documentation and a variety of examples make it easier for developers to get started and effectively use the library.
Open Source
Being an open-source project, C3.js is freely available, and the community can contribute to its development, ensuring continuous improvements and updates.

Possible disadvantages of C3.js

Performance
For complex visualizations and large datasets, C3.js may not perform as fast as other specialized charting libraries.
Limited Advanced Features
While offering a good range of basic chart types, C3.js lacks some of the advanced features and chart types found in more comprehensive charting libraries.
Dependency on D3.js
As C3.js is built on top of D3.js, it inherits some of D3.js's complexity. Developers sometimes need to understand D3.js to fully utilize C3.js's capabilities.
Maintenance and Updates
The pace of updates and new releases is slower compared to some other libraries, which can be an issue for projects requiring the latest features and bug fixes.
Size
C3.js, along with its dependency D3.js, can add significant size to the project, which may impact the performance of web applications, especially on slower networks.

Plotly features and specs

Interactivity
Plotly offers highly interactive plots that allow users to pan, zoom, and hover over data points for more information. This enhances the user experience and provides deeper insights.
High-quality visualizations
It provides aesthetically pleasing and highly customizable charts, making it suitable for publication-quality visuals.
Versatility
Plotly supports multiple chart types including line charts, scatter plots, bar charts, and 3D plots, making it suitable for a wide range of applications.
Python integration
Plotly is well-integrated with Python and works seamlessly with other popular data science libraries like Pandas, NumPy, and Scikit-learn.
Web-based
The plots can be easily embedded in web applications or dashboards, making it ideal for sharing insights over the internet.
Open-source
Plotly offers an open-source version, which allows users to create and share visualizations without any cost.

Possible disadvantages of Plotly

Performance
Rendering very large datasets can sometimes be slow, which may not be suitable for real-time data visualization requirements.
Learning curve
Even though the library is well-documented, the extensive range of features can have a steep learning curve for beginners.
Cost for advanced features
While the basic functionality is free, more advanced features, such as export to certain formats and additional customizable options, require a paid subscription.
Dependency management
Plotly has a number of dependencies that need to be managed properly, which can sometimes complicate the setup process.
Complexity
For simple visualizations, Plotly might be overkill and simpler libraries like Matplotlib or Seaborn could be more appropriate.

C3.js videos

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Plotly videos

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Create Real-time Chart with Javascript | Plotly.js Tutorial

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to C3.js and Plotly)

Plotly

Charting Libraries

16 16%

Charting Libraries

84% 84

Data Visualization

8 8%

Data Visualization

92% 92

Data Dashboard

11 11%

Data Dashboard

89% 89

Diagrams

100 100%

Diagrams

0% 0

User comments

Share your experience with using C3.js and Plotly. For example, how are they different and which one is better?

Reviews

These are some of the external sources and on-site user reviews we've used to compare C3.js and Plotly

C3.js Reviews

5 top picks for JavaScript chart libraries

C3.js is another easy-to-use JavaScript library for creating charts. It uses the D3 graphics library, so to create a chart with it, we’ll need both D3 and the C3 library itself.

Source: blog.logrocket.com

Plotly Reviews

Best 8 Redash Alternatives in 2023 [In Depth Guide]

Plotly is specifically designed for companies who want to build and deploy analytic applications like dashboards using Python, Julia, or R without needing DevOps or Javascript developers.

Source: www.datapad.io

5 Best Python Libraries For Data Visualization in 2023

Plotly is a web-based data visualization toolkit that comes with unique functionalities such as dendrograms, 3D charts, and also contour plots, which is not very common in other libraries. It has a great API offering scatter plots, line charts, bar charts, error bars, box plots, and other visualizations. Plotly can even be accessed from a Python Notebook.

Source: www.technotification.com

Top 8 Python Libraries for Data Visualization

Plotly is a free open-source graphing library that can be used to form data visualizations. Plotly (plotly.py) is built on top of the Plotly JavaScript library (plotly.js) and can be used to create web-based data visualizations that can be displayed in Jupyter notebooks or web applications using Dash or saved as individual HTML files. Plotly provides more than 40 unique...

Source: www.geeksforgeeks.org

5 top picks for JavaScript chart libraries

Plotly is a graphing library that’s available for various runtime environments, including the browser. It supports many kinds of charts and graphs that we can configure with a variety of options.

Source: blog.logrocket.com

Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, Plotly should be more popular than C3.js. It has been mentiond 33 times since March 2021. We are tracking product recommendations and mentions on various public social media platforms and blogs. They can help you identify which product is more popular and what people think of it.

C3.js mentions (11)

Tracking Real-time GitHub Dashboard Commits
The dashboard is a mashup of GitHub, the PubNub Data Stream Network, and D3 chart visualizations powered by C3.js. When a commit is pushed to GitHub, the commit metadata is posted to a small Heroku instance which publishes it to the PubNub network. We’re hosting on dashboard page on GitHub pages. - Source: dev.to / 12 months ago
Graph libraries
I've been using https://c3js.org/ forever with vue. Works with v3 just fine. However, I'm very interested to see what others are using. Source: almost 3 years ago
Teclis – Non-commercial web search
Yes! I found https://c3js.org/ which is exactly what I want for my personal project. - Source: Hacker News / about 3 years ago
[OC] I spent the last 18 months of lockdown pouring my soul into a website that allows you to visualize virtually every U.S. company's international supply chain. E.g. What products, how much, which factories and where does Walmart import from? (Just type a company in the search box)
C3.js is actually something that I like to use on top of D3, specifically for POC's and things like that. It wraps the D3 code in something a little more semantic, provides an API for updating the chart/data, and makes the UI easier to style after the chart is generated. Purely a preference thing, but might be useful in some cases. Source: over 3 years ago
[C3.js][TypeScript] Draw line charts 1
C3.js | D3-based reusable chart library. - Source: dev.to / over 3 years ago

Plotly mentions (33)

Python for Data Visualization: Best Tools and Practices
Plotly is perfect for interactive visualizations. You can create interactive charts and graphs that allow users to hover, click, and zoom in. Plotly is also great for web-based visuals, making it easy to share your findings online. - Source: dev.to / about 2 months ago
Generative AI Powered QnA & Visualization Chatbot
Front End: A React application that leverages React-Chatbotify library to easily integrate a chatbot GUI. It also uses the Plotly library to display the charts/visualizations. The generative AI implementation and details are entirely abstracted from the front end. The front-end application depends on a single REST endpoint of the backend application. - Source: dev.to / 4 months ago
Build a Stock Dashboard in less than 40 lines of Python code!🤓
In this tutorial, Mariya Sha will guide you through building a stock value dashboard using Taipy, Plotly, and a dataset from Kaggle. - Source: dev.to / 5 months ago
Essential Deep Learning Checklist: Best Practices Unveiled
How to Accomplish: Utilize visualization libraries like Matplotlib, Seaborn, or Plotly in Python to create histograms, scatter plots, and bar charts. For image data, use tools that visualize images alongside their labels to check for labeling accuracy. For structured data, correlation matrices and pair plots can be highly informative. - Source: dev.to / 11 months ago
Python equivalent to power bi/power query?
For dashboards: - https://plotly.com/ is probably my favourite, but there are others like streamlit, voila and others... Source: over 1 year ago

What are some alternatives?

When comparing C3.js and Plotly, you can also consider the following products

UMLGraph - UMLGraph is a professional automated drawing tool that allows the designers the declarative specification and drawing of UML class and sequence diagram.

D3.js - D3.js is a JavaScript library for manipulating documents based on data. D3 helps you bring data to life using HTML, SVG, and CSS.

Chart.js - Easy, object oriented client side graphs for designers and developers.

Dia - Dia is a GTK+ based diagram creation program for GNU/Linux, MacOS X, Unix, and Windows, and is released under the GPL license.

Highcharts - A charting library written in pure JavaScript, offering an easy way of adding interactive charts to your web site or web application

yEd - yEd is a free desktop application to quickly create, import, edit, and automatically arrange diagrams. It runs on Windows, Mac OS X, and Unix/Linux.