Software Alternatives, Accelerators & Startups

Highcharts VS Recharts

Compare Highcharts VS Recharts 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

Recharts logo Recharts

Redefined chart library built with React and D3
  • Highcharts Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-03-16
  • Recharts Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-03-13

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.

Recharts features and specs

  • Easy to Use
    Recharts is designed to be simple to set up and use, making it accessible for developers who want to quickly implement charts without deep knowledge of D3 or other complex libraries.
  • React Integration
    As a React-based library, Recharts integrates seamlessly with React applications, allowing developers to utilize components and props to manage chart data and customization.
  • Rich Set of Components
    Recharts offers a variety of pre-built chart types and components, such as line, bar, area, pie, and radar charts, enabling developers to satisfy many visualization needs.
  • Customizable and Flexible
    The library provides a wide range of configuration options and the ability to customize the look and behavior of charts, allowing developers to tailor visualizations to their specific requirements.
  • Active Community and Documentation
    Recharts has a strong community and good documentation, providing support, examples, and guides for both new and advanced users.

Possible disadvantages of Recharts

  • Limited Interactivity
    Compared to more comprehensive libraries like D3.js, Recharts offers limited interactivity and advanced animations, which may not meet the needs of applications requiring dynamic user interactions.
  • Performance with Large Datasets
    Recharts can face performance issues when dealing with large datasets, as it is not optimized for handling large numbers of data points efficiently.
  • Dependence on React
    As it is designed specifically for React, developers using other frameworks or vanilla JavaScript might find it less applicable, limiting its use outside of React projects.
  • Lack of Advanced Customization
    While it offers customization, Recharts doesn’t provide the deep level of customization available in libraries like D3.js, which may be necessary for more complex visualizations.
  • Less Frequent Updates
    The frequency of updates and new features can sometimes lag behind other libraries, potentially limiting access to the latest charting capabilities or bug fixes.

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 Recharts

Overall verdict

  • Recharts is generally considered a good choice for developers looking for an easy-to-use and flexible charting library in the React ecosystem. Its use of composable components allows for efficient integration and customization, which is suitable for both simple and complex charting requirements.

Why this product is good

  • Recharts is a popular charting library for React that is built on top of D3.js and offers a range of customizable components for creating responsive and attractive charts. It is highly appreciated for its simplicity, ease of use, and integration capabilities with React applications. The library provides a rich set of chart types including line, bar, pie, area, and more, making it a versatile tool for data visualization needs.

Recommended for

  • Developers building applications in React who require responsive and customizable charts.
  • Projects that need a quick and easy setup for data visualization without compromising on flexibility.
  • Teams that want to leverage the power of D3.js without directly dealing with its complexity.

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

Recharts videos

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

Add video

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Highcharts and Recharts)
Data Dashboard
85 85%
15% 15
Charting Libraries
77 77%
23% 23
Data Visualization
85 85%
15% 15
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 Recharts

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

Recharts Reviews

6 JavaScript Charting Libraries for Powerful Data Visualizations in 2023
Naturally, it’s preferable if your chosen JS library uses the same frontend framework as the rest of your app. Apart from Recharts, which is a React library, all the libraries on our list are compatible with most popular frameworks. Their APIs make it easy to integrate charts into your apps or web pages.
Source: embeddable.com
15 JavaScript Libraries for Creating Beautiful Charts
Recharts is a composable charting library for building charts with decoupled, reusable React components. It’s built on top of SVG elements and D3.js. Check out the list of examples.

Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, Recharts seems to be more popular. It has been mentiond 18 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.

Recharts mentions (18)

  • Demystifying npm package installation: Insights, analysis and optimization tips
    In order to run each scenario, there must be a package.json file present. For this analysis, we will use the following package.json file. This is a real package.json file, that I've used when creating a simple demo of Recharts library. - Source: dev.to / about 1 month ago
  • A new way to make graphs more accessible to blind and low-vision readers
    I know the Recharts[1] library have been trying to make their charts more accessibility, but so far I haven't seen any users with screen readers give feedback. If there are any users here with screenreaders, can you read the chart on this link: https://www.chartmaker.io/charts/Ra1UTI7gArCTO0o2MV4zZ [1]: https://recharts.org/. - Source: Hacker News / about 2 months ago
  • Ask HN: What's the best charting library for customer-facing dashboards?
    Chartjs looks great, but I've never used it so can't recommend personally. I've used https://recharts.org a lot with success. - Source: Hacker News / about 1 year ago
  • Complete Tutorial: React Admin Panel with refine and daisyUI
    We first build the dashboard page where we present stats for relevant KPIs in cards, charts and a table. We use the React-based Recharts library for plotting our data. - Source: dev.to / over 1 year ago
  • Climate Change Tracker
    For the charts a heavily customized version of recharts (https://recharts.org/) and for the globe threejs (https://threejs.org). - Source: Hacker News / over 1 year ago
View more

What are some alternatives?

When comparing Highcharts and Recharts, 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.

ApexCharts - Open-source modern charting library 📊

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.

Plotly - Low-Code Data Apps