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D3.js VS Chartist.js

Compare D3.js VS Chartist.js and see what are their differences

D3.js logo 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.

Chartist.js logo Chartist.js

Chartist.JS - simple responsive charts.
  • D3.js Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-07-11

D3 allows you to bind arbitrary data to a Document Object Model (DOM), and then apply data-driven transformations to the document. For example, you can use D3 to generate an HTML table from an array of numbers. Or, use the same data to create an interactive SVG bar chart with smooth transitions and interaction.

D3 is not a monolithic framework that seeks to provide every conceivable feature. Instead, D3 solves the crux of the problem: efficient manipulation of documents based on data. This avoids proprietary representation and affords extraordinary flexibility, exposing the full capabilities of web standards such as HTML, SVG, and CSS. With minimal overhead, D3 is extremely fast, supporting large datasets and dynamic behaviors for interaction and animation. D3’s functional style allows code reuse through a diverse collection of official and community-developed modules.

  • Chartist.js Landing page
    Landing page //
    2018-11-26

D3.js features and specs

  • Powerful Visualization
    D3.js allows for the creation of highly customized and interactive data visualizations, harnessing the full power of web standards like SVG, Canvas, and HTML.
  • Data Binding
    It offers robust support for data-driven transformations and binding, enabling intuitive connections between data sets and DOM elements.
  • Community and Ecosystem
    A large and active community contributes to tutorials, plugins, and tools, which can significantly simplify the development process.
  • Flexibility
    D3.js is highly flexible, providing low-level manipulation capabilities without being tied to any specific chart types or patterns.
  • Performance
    It is highly optimized for performance, allowing for efficient rendering of complex visualizations even with large data sets.

Possible disadvantages of D3.js

  • Steep Learning Curve
    D3.js has a steep learning curve due to its low-level nature and requires a solid understanding of JavaScript, DOM manipulation, and data concepts.
  • Complexity
    Creating complex visualizations can be time-consuming and require a significant amount of custom code, making it less approachable for quick, simple tasks.
  • Browser Compatibility
    Although widely supported, some D3.js features may have inconsistent behavior across different browsers, requiring additional testing and debugging.
  • Documentation
    While extensive, D3.js documentation can be challenging for beginners to navigate and understand, causing misunderstandings and slower development times.
  • Dependency Management
    The library itself is modular, but managing dependencies and integrating D3.js with other JavaScript frameworks or libraries can sometimes be problematic.

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.

Analysis of D3.js

Overall verdict

  • Yes, D3.js is a highly regarded library for data visualization in the web development community.

Why this product is good

  • Flexibility: D3.js provides incredible flexibility in creating complex and interactive visualizations with web standards (SVG, HTML, and CSS).
  • Customization: It allows for high levels of customization, which lets developers create unique and detailed visualizations tailored to their specific needs.
  • Community and Ecosystem: D3.js has a large, active community and a rich ecosystem of plugins and extensions conducive to learning and integration.
  • Data Binding: Offers powerful ways to manipulate documents based on data; the data-driven approach simplifies dynamic interaction creation.
  • Performance: Efficiently manipulates DOM elements and performs well with large datasets if used correctly.

Recommended for

  • Data Scientists and Analysts looking to create custom, interactive visualizations.
  • Web Developers who need to incorporate complex data visualizations into applications.
  • Educators and Researchers presenting data in an engaging way.
  • Anyone needing to build bespoke visualizations that are not possible with off-the-shelf solutions.

Analysis of Chartist.js

Overall verdict

  • Chartist.js is a good choice for developers who need to create responsive, lightweight, and customizable charts within their web projects. Its simplicity, combined with robust functionality, makes it a solid choice for many use cases.

Why this product is good

  • Chartist.js is a popular open-source library for creating simple, responsive charts on web pages. It is well-regarded for its simplicity and ease of use, as well as its ability to create responsive and stylish charts with minimal amount of code. The library is highly customizable, providing developers with a wide range of options to tailor the visual appearance of charts. It is also lightweight, making it ideal for developing fast-loading web applications.

Recommended for

    Chartist.js is recommended for developers who are building web applications that require dynamic data visualization but need a simple, straightforward tool. It is particularly well-suited for projects where responsiveness and customization are important, and where the performance impact of additional libraries needs to be minimized.

D3.js videos

Data Visualization with D3.js - Full Tutorial Course

More videos:

  • Review - Let's learn D3.js - D3 for data visualization (full course)

Chartist.js videos

No Chartist.js videos yet. You could help us improve this page by suggesting one.

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Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to D3.js and Chartist.js)
Charting Libraries
81 81%
19% 19
Data Visualization
88 88%
12% 12
Data Dashboard
82 82%
18% 18
Javascript UI Libraries

User comments

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Reviews

These are some of the external sources and on-site user reviews we've used to compare D3.js and Chartist.js

D3.js Reviews

6 JavaScript Charting Libraries for Powerful Data Visualizations in 2023
Depending on your requirements, the best JavaScript library is D3.js, as it’s by far the most customizable. However, it’s also really complex and difficult to master. Plus, it’s not as compatible with TypeScript as it is with JavaScript, which can be off-putting for some developers. If you’d prefer a less complex library that you can use with TypeScript, ECharts, and...
Source: embeddable.com
15 JavaScript Libraries for Creating Beautiful Charts
When we think of charting today, D3.js is the first name that comes up. Being an open source project, D3.js definitely brings many powerful features that were missing in most of the existing libraries. Features like dynamic properties, Enter and Exit, powerful transitions, and syntax familiarity with jQuery make it one the best JavaScript libraries for charting. Charts in...
Top 20 Javascript Libraries
D3 stands for Data-Driven Documents. With D3, you can apply data-driven transformations to DOM objects. The keyword with D3 is ‘data-driven,’ which means documents are manipulated depending on the data received. Data can be received in any format and bound with DOM objects. D3 is very fast and supports dynamic behavior for animation and interactions. There are plenty of...
Source: hackr.io
20+ JavaScript libraries to draw your own diagrams (2022 edition)
D3.js is a JavaScript library for manipulating documents based on data. Right now, I would say is the most popular library of its kind.
15 data science tools to consider using in 2021
Another open source tool, D3.js is a JavaScript library for creating custom data visualizations in a web browser. Commonly known as D3, which stands for Data-Driven Documents, it uses web standards, such as HTML, Scalable Vector Graphics and CSS, instead of its own graphical vocabulary. D3's developers describe it as a dynamic and flexible tool that requires a minimum amount...

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

Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, D3.js seems to be a lot more popular than Chartist.js. While we know about 167 links to D3.js, we've tracked only 12 mentions of Chartist.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.

D3.js mentions (167)

  • IO Devices and Latency
    Do you mean something for data visualization, or tricks condensing large data sets with cursors? https://d3js.org/ Best of luck =3. - Source: Hacker News / 3 months ago
  • 2024 Nuxt3 Annual Ecosystem Summary🚀
    Document address: D3.js Official Document. - Source: dev.to / 6 months ago
  • 100+ Must-Have Web Development Resources
    D3.js: One of the most popular JavaScript visualization libraries. - Source: dev.to / 8 months ago
  • What are npm Peer Dependencies and how to use them?
    A Dependency is an npm package that our code depends on in order to be able to run. Some popular packages that can be added as dependencies are lodash, D3, and chartjs. - Source: dev.to / 8 months ago
  • Introducing RacingBars 📊
    RacingBars is an open-source, light-weight (~45kb gzipped), easy-to-use, and feature-rich javascript library for bar chart race, based on D3.js. - Source: dev.to / 10 months ago
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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 / over 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: about 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 / almost 3 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

What are some alternatives?

When comparing D3.js and Chartist.js, you can also consider the following products

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

Plotly - Low-Code Data Apps

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!