Software Alternatives, Accelerators & Startups

Chartist.js VS Chart.js

Compare Chartist.js VS Chart.js and see what are their differences

Chartist.js logo Chartist.js

Chartist.JS - simple responsive charts.

Chart.js logo Chart.js

Easy, object oriented client side graphs for designers and developers.
  • Chartist.js Landing page
    Landing page //
    2018-11-26
  • Chart.js Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-03-13

Chartist.js features and specs

  • Simple to Use
    Chartist.js has a straightforward API that makes it easy for developers to create responsive charts with minimal code.
  • SVG-Based
    Charts are rendered in SVG, which ensures high quality and scalability across different screen sizes and devices.
  • Responsive Design
    Charts created with Chartist.js are responsive by default, automatically adjusting to fit different screen sizes.
  • Customizable
    Provides a high level of customization through options, CSS, and plugins, allowing for flexible chart designs.
  • Lightweight
    Chartist.js is a lightweight library, minimizing the impact on page load times and overall performance.
  • Open Source
    It is open source, meaning developers can contribute to its development or customize the library to fit their needs.

Possible disadvantages of Chartist.js

  • Limited Features
    Compared to some other charting libraries, Chartist.js has limited out-of-the-box features and chart types.
  • Customization Complexity
    While highly customizable, achieving complex customizations can be challenging and may require significant coding and CSS adjustments.
  • Plugin Dependency
    To add certain functionalities, you might need to rely on third-party plugins, which can lead to inconsistencies and additional dependencies.
  • Lack of Interactivity
    Chartist.js offers limited interactivity, such as tooltips or animations, compared to other advanced charting libraries.
  • Performance Issues
    For very large datasets or highly complex charts, performance may degrade, as SVG rendering can be resource-intensive.
  • Limited Documentation
    Some aspects of the library, especially advanced customizations, are not well-documented, which can make implementation more difficult.

Chart.js features and specs

  • Open Source
    Chart.js is open source and free to use, which makes it accessible for both personal and commercial projects without any licensing costs.
  • Ease of Use
    Chart.js is known for its simple and easy-to-use API. Developers can quickly create charts by just including the library and writing minimal JavaScript.
  • Lightweight
    The library is relatively lightweight compared to other charting libraries, which helps in maintaining the performance of web applications.
  • Responsive Design
    Charts created with Chart.js are responsive by default, ensuring that they look good on all devices, including desktops, tablets, and mobile phones.
  • Variety of Chart Types
    Chart.js supports a variety of chart types including line, bar, radar, pie, doughnut, and polar area charts, providing flexibility for different data visualization needs.
  • Customization
    Developers can customize the appearance of charts extensively through Chart.js options such as colors, labels, and tooltips.
  • Active Community
    Chart.js has an active community and a strong support base, which means that developers can easily find help, tutorials, and plugins to enhance functionality.

Possible disadvantages of Chart.js

  • Limited Advanced Features
    While Chart.js is good for basic and intermediate charting needs, it may lack some advanced features and customizations offered by more complex charting libraries like D3.js.
  • Performance Issues with Large Datasets
    Chart.js can struggle with performance when dealing with very large datasets or complex visualizations, which can result in slower rendering times.
  • Learning Curve for Customization
    Although the basic usage is straightforward, achieving deeper customizations can involve a steeper learning curve as it requires understanding the underlying JavaScript and options.
  • Limited Interactivity
    Interactivity options with Chart.js are somewhat limited compared to other libraries that offer more advanced interactive features.
  • Dependency on Canvas
    Charts are rendered using the HTML5 canvas element, which may not be as flexible as SVG-based rendering used by some other libraries.

Chartist.js videos

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Chart.js videos

1.3: Graphing with Chart.js - Working With Data & APIs in JavaScript

More videos:

  • Tutorial - How to Build Ionic 4 Apps with Chart.js

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Chartist.js and Chart.js)
Charting Libraries
22 22%
78% 78
Data Dashboard
20 20%
80% 80
Data Visualization
14 14%
86% 86
Javascript UI Libraries
24 24%
76% 76

User comments

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Reviews

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

Chartist.js Reviews

15 JavaScript Libraries for Creating Beautiful Charts
Chartist.js provides beautiful responsive charts. Just like ChartJS, Chartist.js is the product of a community that was frustrated by using highly-priced JavaScript charting libraries. It uses SVG to render the charts. It can be controlled and customized through CSS3 media queries and Sass. Also, note that Chartist.js provides cool animations that will work only in modern...
Top 10 JavaScript Charting Libraries for Every Data Visualization Need
Chartist.js is an open-source, unintrusive JS library which can also be used to create nice responsive charts. Generally, Chartist is good for those who need a very simple chart — line, bar, or pie — and who do not require much in terms of data visualization. Good appearance, no need to have many great features in this case.
Source: hackernoon.com
A Complete Overview of the Best Data Visualization Tools
Chartist.js is a free, open-source JavaScript library that allows for creating simple responsive charts that are highly customizable and cross-browser compatible. The entire JavaScript library is only 10KB when GZIPped. Charts created with Chartist.js can also be animated, and plugins allow it to be extended.
Source: www.toptal.com
The Best Data Visualization Tools - Top 30 BI Software
Chartist.js is the result of a desire to create a JavaScript charting library that’s above all of the rest. Leveraging Sass, the styles of the data visualization tool are fully customizable and boasts a responsive, DPI independent, and media query-based SVG output. Chartist.js can be easily integrated with WordPress, Ember, Meteor, React, and AngularJS through a variety of...
Source: improvado.io

Chart.js Reviews

6 JavaScript Charting Libraries for Powerful Data Visualizations in 2023
Of the free libraries on this list, ECharts has the widest range of chart types available, second only to D3. Unlike D3, ECharts also ranks highly on the user-friendliness scale, although some users find ApexCharts and Chart.js even easier to use. You can check out some examples of basic charts on ECharts.
Source: embeddable.com
5 top picks for JavaScript chart libraries
Chart.js is a chart library that is available as a client-side JavaScript package. There are also derivatives for other frontend frameworks, like React, Vue, and Angular. It displays the chart on an HTML canvas element.
Top 10 JavaScript Charting Libraries for Every Data Visualization Need
Chart.js is a simple yet quite flexible JavaScript library for data viz, popular among web designers and developers. It’s a great basic solution for those who don’t need lots of chart types and customization features but want their charts to look neat, clear and informative at a glance.
Source: hackernoon.com
A Complete Overview of the Best Data Visualization Tools
Chart.js uses HTML5 Canvas for output, so it renders charts well across all modern browsers. Charts created are also responsive, so it’s great for creating visualizations that are mobile-friendly.
Source: www.toptal.com
The Best Data Visualization Tools - Top 30 BI Software
Chart.js is better for smaller chart projects. It’s open source and small in size, supporting six different types of charts: bar, line, pie, radar, doughnut, and polar. You can also add or remove any of these 6 types to reduce your footprint. Chart.js uses HTML5 Canvas and ships with polyfills for IE6/7 support. Chart.js offers the ability to create simple charts quickly.
Source: improvado.io

Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, Chartist.js seems to be a lot more popular than Chart.js. While we know about 12 links to Chartist.js, we've tracked only 1 mention of Chart.js. 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.

Chartist.js mentions (12)

  • Free SVG generators, color tools and web design tools
    Here's a JS framework that seems to do almost everything you want (outside of not requiring a JS framework, of course). It's a Sass project and uses Node modules, so I wasn't able to get it running using vanila js. (I'm not much of a JS dev.) I'm also interested in other players in this space. SVG seems like the ideal way to make static plots. https://gionkunz.github.io/chartist-js/. - Source: Hacker News / about 1 year ago
  • Looking for savable graphing methods
    If you are sending the data to a website, or serving the website yourself, using JSON as the data format will be the easiest. Personally I never use cloud services and I just use a Javascript charting library like https://gionkunz.github.io/chartist-js/ (it supports real-time graphs) on a web page that is self-hosted (run a server on the ESP32). Source: almost 2 years ago
  • Chartist: Simple Responsive Charts in SVG
    The author went through the effort of creating a marketing site with documentation and examples. https://gionkunz.github.io/chartist-js/. - Source: Hacker News / over 2 years ago
  • The Best GitHub Repositories For Django Developers.
    With django-controlcenter you can have all of your models on one single page and build beautiful charts with Chartist.js. Actually they don't even have to be a django models, get your data from wherever you want: RDBMS, NOSQL, text file or even from an external web-page, it doesn't matter. - Source: dev.to / over 2 years ago
  • Vuenique, an open-source library bringing the power of low-level visualization to Vue
    Anyone here have some good suggestions for mature, easy to use graph libraries for Vue 3? Maybe I should write a wrapper around Chartist myself... Source: about 3 years ago
View more

Chart.js mentions (1)

  • Chart library for Svelte?
    Https://chartjs.org works well, but you have to call the update function yourself if you want to do some reactive updates. Source: almost 4 years ago

What are some alternatives?

When comparing Chartist.js and Chart.js, you can also consider the following products

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.

AnyChart - Award-winning JavaScript charting library & Qlik Sense extensions from a global leader in data visualization! Loved by thousands of happy customers, including over 75% of Fortune 500 companies & over half of the top 1000 software vendors worldwide.

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

Google Charts - Interactive charts for browsers and mobile devices.

ZingChart - ZingChart is a fast, modern, powerful JavaScript charting library for building animated, interactive charts and graphs. Bring on the big data!

Plotly - Low-Code Data Apps