Software Alternatives & Reviews

Observable VS Plotly

Compare Observable VS Plotly and see what are their differences

Observable logo Observable

Interactive code examples/posts

Plotly logo Plotly

Low-Code Data Apps
  • Observable Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-10-09
  • Plotly Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-07-31

Observable videos

Observable Overview

More videos:

  • Review - observablehq.com review observable hq data analysis
  • Review - Hands-on Data Visualization with Observable Plot

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 Observable and Plotly)
Data Visualization
48 48%
52% 52
Data Dashboard
42 42%
58% 58
Data Science And Machine Learning
Charting Libraries
0 0%
100% 100

User comments

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Reviews

These are some of the external sources and on-site user reviews we've used to compare Observable and Plotly

Observable Reviews

Top 10 Grafana Alternatives in 2024
Observable is a Grafana alternative that enables users to visualize data via charts and dashboards using code.
Source: middleware.io
Embedded analytics in B2B SaaS: A comparison
A few options were disregarded from the start due to a hefty price tag, these were Looker, Tableau, Power BI, GoodData. A few options like Trevor.io, Preset, Observable were disregarded as they did not seem to fit our criteria (based on the evaluation matrix).
Source: medium.com

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, Observable should be more popular than Plotly. It has been mentiond 286 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.

Observable mentions (286)

  • I'm writing a new vector search SQLite Extension
    Could this be implemented in Rust? Does that project (sqlite-loadable-rs) support WASM? https://observablehq.com/@asg017/introducing-sqlite-loadable-rs. - Source: Hacker News / about 15 hours ago
  • Show HN: An extension to track your Wikipedia adventures
    Have you tried out a tangled-tree visualization? [1] I've found it to be super useful when visualizing these sorts of relationships in a compact way. [1] https://observablehq.com/@nitaku/tangled-tree-visualization-ii. - Source: Hacker News / 1 day ago
  • A feature-rich front-end drag-and-drop component library
    Maybe I'm easy to impress, but I always stop and play around with the nested tree example when I come across Sortable. It works so flawlessly, and feels very tuned to mobile dnd. It even works to arrange (and reflow) inline spans in a paragraph! I have yet to come across this functionality in a text editor.. [0]: https://observablehq.com/@dleeftink/sortable-playground. - Source: Hacker News / 9 days ago
  • Parquet-WASM: Rust-based WebAssembly bindings to read and write Parquet data
    Arrow JS is just ArrayBuffers underneath. You do want to amortize some operations to avoid unnecessary conversions. I.e. Arrow JS stores strings as UTF-8, but native JS strings are UTF-16 I believe. Arrow is especially powerful across the WASM <--> JS boundary! In fact, I wrote a library to interpret Arrow from Wasm memory into JS without any copies [0]. (Motivating blog post [1]) [0]:... - Source: Hacker News / 11 days ago
  • A flat map with the least error possible: The Gott-Goldberg-Vanderbei projection
    Here’s the D3 implementation (which is just an interrupted azimuthal equidistant projection): https://observablehq.com/@d3/azimuthal-equidistant-hemispheres. - Source: Hacker News / 12 days 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: 5 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: 11 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: 12 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 Observable and Plotly, you can also consider the following products

RunKit - RunKit notebooks are interactive javascript playgrounds connected to a complete node environment right in your browser. Every npm module pre-installed.

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.

Jupyter - Project Jupyter exists to develop open-source software, open-standards, and services for interactive computing across dozens of programming languages. Ready to get started? Try it in your browser Install the Notebook.

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

Vega-Lite - High-level grammar of interactive graphics