Software Alternatives & Reviews

D3.js VS Plotly

Compare D3.js VS Plotly 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.

Plotly logo Plotly

Low-Code Data Apps
  • 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.

  • Plotly Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-07-31

D3.js

Categories
  • Javascript UI Libraries
  • Charting Libraries
  • Data Visualization
  • Data Dashboard
Website d3js.org
Pricing URL-
Details $
Platforms
JavaScript

Plotly

Categories
  • Application And Data
  • Developer Tools
  • App Development
  • App Deployment
  • Data Visualization
  • Low Code
Website plotly.com
Pricing URL Official Plotly Pricing
Details $-
Platforms
-

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)

Plotly videos

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

More videos:

  • Review - Introducing plotly.py 3.0
  • Review - Is Plotly The Better Matplotlib?
  • Tutorial - Plotly Tutorial 2021
  • Review - Data Visualization as The First and Last Mile of Data Science Plotly Express and Dash | SciPy 2021

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to D3.js and Plotly)
Charting Libraries
66 66%
34% 34
Data Visualization
57 57%
43% 43
Data Dashboard
59 59%
41% 41
Javascript UI Libraries
100 100%
0% 0

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 Plotly

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...

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.
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...
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.

Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, D3.js should be more popular than Plotly. It has been mentiond 158 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.

D3.js mentions (158)

  • Full Stack Web Development Concept map
    d3 - very power visualization library enabling dynamic visualizations. docs. - Source: dev.to / 5 days ago
  • Observable 2.0, a static site generator for data apps
    Yep, Evidence is doing good work. We were most directly inspired by VitePress; we spent months rewriting both D3’s docs (https://d3js.org) and Observable Plot’s docs (https://observablehq.com/plot) in VitePress, and absolutely loved the experience. But we wanted a tool focused on data apps, dashboards, reports — observability and business intelligence use cases rather than documentation. Compared to Evidence, I’d... - Source: Hacker News / about 1 month ago
  • What is the technology stack used to create these live charts?
    They are images so it could be any number of things, datawrapper, charts.js, d3.js to name a few options. Source: 4 months ago
  • Animated map showing frequency and location of births around the world [OC]
    I made this interactive visualization that attempts to show the real-time frequency and location of births around the world. A country’s annual births (i.e. The country’s population times its birthrate) were distributed across all of the populated locations in each country, weighted by the population distribution (i.e. More populated areas got a greater fraction of the births). Data Sources and... Source: 4 months ago
  • How to use Next.js and Recharts to build an information dashboard
    Recharts is a composable charting library built on React components and D3.js. It contains API’s which allow you to easily add 11 different highly configurable chart types to your React application. Recharts is one of the most popular React.js charting libraries with over 20k likes on GitHub. - Source: dev.to / 7 months ago
View more

Plotly mentions (29)

  • 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: 4 months ago
  • Junior Developer asked to make Saaas in first month.
    If your CEO wants you to solo build an alternative to Tableau, PowerBi, or even Plotly then consider him/her delusional. Source: 10 months ago
  • PSA: You don't need fancy stuff to do good work.
    Python's pandas, NumPy, and SciPy libraries offer powerful functionality for data manipulation, while matplotlib, seaborn, and plotly provide versatile tools for creating visualizations. Similarly, in R, you can use dplyr, tidyverse, and data.table for data manipulation, and ggplot2, lattice, and shiny for visualization. These packages enable you to create insightful visualizations and perform statistical analyses... Source: 11 months ago
  • Wait, but I thought they were the same thing?
    I use plotly and like it a lot. It is slower though. Noticeable if you want to batch-generate a bunch of images and dump them into a folder. But that probably isn't the case most times. Source: about 1 year ago
  • Storing your data in a Plotly Dash data dashboard
    Plotly Dash is a great framework for developing interactive data dashboards using Python, R, and Javascript. It works alongside Plotly to bring your beautiful visualizations to the masses. - Source: dev.to / over 1 year ago
View more

What are some alternatives?

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

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

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.

RAWGraphs - RAWGraphs is an open source app built with the goal of making the visualization of complex data...

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.

Tableau - Tableau can help anyone see and understand their data. Connect to almost any database, drag and drop to create visualizations, and share with a click.