Software Alternatives, Accelerators & Startups

Highcharts VS Chartist.js

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

Highcharts logo Highcharts

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

Chartist.js logo Chartist.js

Chartist.JS - simple responsive charts.
  • Highcharts Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-03-16
  • Chartist.js Landing page
    Landing page //
    2018-11-26

Highcharts features and specs

  • Customization
    Highcharts provides extensive options to customize chart appearance and functionality, allowing for a tailored and specific data visualization experience.
  • Cross-Browser Compatibility
    Highcharts ensures compatibility across a wide range of browsers, making charts accessible to users regardless of their browser preferences.
  • Wide Range of Chart Types
    Offers a broad spectrum of chart types, including line, bar, pie, scatter, and more, catering to various data visualization needs.
  • Interactive Features
    Includes numerous interactive features such as tooltips, zooming, and clickable points, enhancing user engagement with the data.
  • Strong Community and Support
    Has an active community and provides extensive documentation, forums, and professional support options to assist users in overcoming challenges.
  • Performance
    Optimized for high performance, allowing for the rendering of large datasets without significant lag or performance issues.
  • Exporting and Sharing
    Built-in options for exporting charts to various formats (PNG, JPEG, PDF, etc.) and sharing them easily.

Possible disadvantages of Highcharts

  • Cost
    Highcharts is not free for commercial use, which may be a drawback for small businesses or individual developers with limited budgets.
  • Steep Learning Curve
    Despite comprehensive documentation, the abundance of features and customization options can result in a steeper learning curve for new users.
  • Dependency on JavaScript
    As a JavaScript library, Highcharts requires a solid understanding of JavaScript, making it less accessible for developers not familiar with the language.
  • Limited Free Support
    While there is a free support forum, professional support options are paid, which can be a limitation for users needing urgent assistance without extra costs.
  • Mobile Responsiveness
    Although Highcharts provides some support for mobile responsiveness, achieving optimal performance and displays on all device types may require additional customization.

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 Highcharts

Overall verdict

  • Highcharts is a strong choice for those seeking a robust and feature-rich charting library. Its popularity among developers and businesses stems from its reliability and comprehensive feature set.

Why this product is good

  • Highcharts is considered good because it offers a wide range of chart types and is highly customizable. It is known for its detailed documentation, ease of use, and cross-platform compatibility. Additionally, Highcharts provides extensive support and a variety of integrations with popular frameworks, making it a versatile choice for developers.

Recommended for

  • Developers looking for a user-friendly and customizable charting library.
  • Projects that require extensive interactive data visualizations.
  • Businesses that need a reliable and professionally supported charting solution.
  • Teams using web technologies and frameworks like Angular, React, or Vue for front-end development.

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.

Highcharts videos

Angular 2 & HighCharts Quick-Tip: Dynamic Data & Draggable Points (2016)

More videos:

  • Tutorial - How to define the custom colors for Highcharts?
  • Review - Data Visualization HighCharts

Chartist.js videos

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

Add video

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Highcharts and Chartist.js)
Data Dashboard
79 79%
21% 21
Charting Libraries
72 72%
28% 28
Data Visualization
83 83%
17% 17
Business Intelligence
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 Highcharts and Chartist.js

Highcharts Reviews

6 JavaScript Charting Libraries for Powerful Data Visualizations in 2023
However, you might need to pay for additional packages to get exactly what you’re looking for. The Highcharts Core package includes all the essentials (like line, bar, area, and pie charts) but Maps, Gantt, and Stock chart packages are all extra. In terms of cost, this makes Highcharts somewhat less scalable, depending on the budget available for your project.
Source: embeddable.com
15 JavaScript Libraries for Creating Beautiful Charts
Highcharts is another very popular library for building graphs. It comes loaded with many different types of cool animations that are sufficient to attract many eyeballs to your website. Just like other libraries, Highcharts comes with many pre-built graphs like spline, area, areaspline, column, bar, pie, scatter, etc. The charts are responsive and mobile-ready. Besides,...
Best Data Visualization Tools
For companies that want to embed interactive visualizations in their online content, look no further than Datawrapper. Highcharts is another great option for embedding interactive content into your sites, though it’s not as easy for non-specialists as Datawrapper.
Source: neilpatel.com
Top 10 JavaScript Charting Libraries for Every Data Visualization Need
Highcharts is one of the most comprehensive and popular JavaScript charting libraries based on HTML5, rendering in SVG/VML. It is lightweight, supports a wide range of diverse chart types, and ensures high performance.
Source: hackernoon.com
The Best Data Visualization Tools - Top 30 BI Software
Highcharts is a battle-tested SVG-based, multi-platform charting library that has been actively developed since 2009. Its JavaScript API integrates easily, and features robust documentation, advanced responsiveness and industry-leading accessibility support. You can add interactive, mobile-optimized charts to your web and mobile projects. Charts are rendered in SVG and a VML...
Source: improvado.io

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, Chartist.js seems to be more popular. It has been mentiond 12 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.

Highcharts mentions (0)

We have not tracked any mentions of Highcharts yet. Tracking of Highcharts recommendations started around Mar 2021.

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 Highcharts and Chartist.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.

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

Google Charts - Interactive charts for browsers and mobile devices.

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.

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