Software Alternatives, Accelerators & Startups

Plotly VS Streamlit

Compare Plotly VS Streamlit and see what are their differences

Plotly logo Plotly

Low-Code Data Apps

Streamlit logo Streamlit

Turn python scripts into beautiful ML tools
  • Plotly Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-07-31
  • Streamlit Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-10-07

Plotly features and specs

  • Interactivity
    Plotly offers highly interactive plots that allow users to pan, zoom, and hover over data points for more information. This enhances the user experience and provides deeper insights.
  • High-quality visualizations
    It provides aesthetically pleasing and highly customizable charts, making it suitable for publication-quality visuals.
  • Versatility
    Plotly supports multiple chart types including line charts, scatter plots, bar charts, and 3D plots, making it suitable for a wide range of applications.
  • Python integration
    Plotly is well-integrated with Python and works seamlessly with other popular data science libraries like Pandas, NumPy, and Scikit-learn.
  • Web-based
    The plots can be easily embedded in web applications or dashboards, making it ideal for sharing insights over the internet.
  • Open-source
    Plotly offers an open-source version, which allows users to create and share visualizations without any cost.

Possible disadvantages of Plotly

  • Performance
    Rendering very large datasets can sometimes be slow, which may not be suitable for real-time data visualization requirements.
  • Learning curve
    Even though the library is well-documented, the extensive range of features can have a steep learning curve for beginners.
  • Cost for advanced features
    While the basic functionality is free, more advanced features, such as export to certain formats and additional customizable options, require a paid subscription.
  • Dependency management
    Plotly has a number of dependencies that need to be managed properly, which can sometimes complicate the setup process.
  • Complexity
    For simple visualizations, Plotly might be overkill and simpler libraries like Matplotlib or Seaborn could be more appropriate.

Streamlit features and specs

  • Ease of Use
    Streamlit's API is extremely intuitive and easy to learn, which makes it accessible for developers of varying experience levels. The simplicity allows for rapid development and less time spent on complex front-end coding.
  • Interactive Widgets
    It provides a set of interactive widgets that make it simple to add complex functionalities like sliders, buttons, and file uploaders to your application with minimal code.
  • Real-time Feedback
    Streamlit supports real-time data updates, allowing users to see changes instantly. This is particularly useful for data analysis and machine learning applications where live data visualization is crucial.
  • Integration with Machine Learning Libraries
    Streamlit integrates seamlessly with popular machine learning libraries like TensorFlow, PyTorch, and scikit-learn, making it a great tool for showcasing machine learning models and results.
  • Open Source
    Being an open-source project, Streamlit is free to use and comes with the support and contributions of an active community. This means continuous improvements and a wealth of shared resources.

Possible disadvantages of Streamlit

  • Limited Customization
    Streamlit offers limited customization options compared to traditional web frameworks. This can be a hindrance if you need a highly customized UI/UX for your application.
  • Performance Issues
    For more complex or resource-intensive applications, Streamlit may suffer from performance drawbacks. It is not designed for high-performance computing out of the box.
  • Scalability
    Streamlit is not well-suited for large-scale applications requiring major backend architecture or for scenarios demanding high scalability and concurrency.
  • Limited Widget Style Options
    The styling and customization options for widgets are somewhat limited, meaning your application's look and feel might be more constrained compared to using other front-end frameworks.
  • Deployment Complexity
    While Streamlit provides some deployment options, deploying Streamlit apps in a production environment can sometimes require additional effort and knowledge, especially for those unfamiliar with web deployment practices.

Analysis of Plotly

Overall verdict

  • Overall, Plotly is a strong choice for those looking to create dynamic and interactive data visualizations, thanks to its range of features and ease of integration with web technologies.

Why this product is good

  • Plotly is considered good because it offers a comprehensive suite of tools for creating interactive visualizations that can be used in web applications, reports, and dashboards. It supports many different types of plots, is easy to use for both beginners and experienced developers, and integrates well with popular programming languages like Python, R, and JavaScript.

Recommended for

    Plotly is recommended for data scientists, analysts, and developers who need to create interactive and visually appealing data visualizations. It's particularly useful for those who work with Python or R and want the ability to embed their visualizations in web applications or dashboards.

Analysis of Streamlit

Overall verdict

  • Overall, Streamlit is well-regarded for its ease of use, speed of development, and ability to create clean and professional-looking applications without in-depth web development knowledge. It provides a seamless bridge between complex data analysis and user-friendly presentation, which can be highly beneficial for a wide range of use cases.

Why this product is good

  • Streamlit is a popular choice for quickly building and deploying data applications and interactive dashboards with minimal code. It is designed to be user-friendly, allowing data scientists and engineers to transform their scripts into shareable web apps. It supports real-time updates, is highly customizable, and integrates well with Python libraries like NumPy, Pandas, and Matplotlib, making it an attractive option for many developers working within the Python ecosystem.

Recommended for

    Streamlit is ideal for data scientists, analysts, and developers looking to rapidly prototype and deploy data-driven applications. It is recommended for those who prioritize simplicity, quick deployment, and seamless integration with Python code. Individuals or teams interested in building dashboards, ML model sharing platforms, or interactive reports will find Streamlit particularly useful.

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

Streamlit videos

My thoughts on web frameworks in Python and R (PyWebIO vs Streamlit vs R Shiny)

More videos:

  • Review - 1/4: What is Streamlit
  • Tutorial - How to Build a Streamlit App (Beginner level Streamlit tutorial) - Part 1

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Plotly and Streamlit)
Data Visualization
100 100%
0% 0
Developer Tools
0 0%
100% 100
Data Dashboard
100 100%
0% 0
Productivity
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 Plotly and Streamlit

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.

Streamlit Reviews

We have no reviews of Streamlit yet.
Be the first one to post

Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, Streamlit should be more popular than Plotly. It has been mentiond 210 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.

Plotly mentions (33)

  • Python for Data Visualization: Best Tools and Practices
    Plotly is perfect for interactive visualizations. You can create interactive charts and graphs that allow users to hover, click, and zoom in. Plotly is also great for web-based visuals, making it easy to share your findings online. - Source: dev.to / 2 months ago
  • Generative AI Powered QnA & Visualization Chatbot
    Front End: A React application that leverages React-Chatbotify library to easily integrate a chatbot GUI. It also uses the Plotly library to display the charts/visualizations. The generative AI implementation and details are entirely abstracted from the front end. The front-end application depends on a single REST endpoint of the backend application. - Source: dev.to / 4 months ago
  • Build a Stock Dashboard in less than 40 lines of Python code!🤓
    In this tutorial, Mariya Sha will guide you through building a stock value dashboard using Taipy, Plotly, and a dataset from Kaggle. - Source: dev.to / 6 months ago
  • Essential Deep Learning Checklist: Best Practices Unveiled
    How to Accomplish: Utilize visualization libraries like Matplotlib, Seaborn, or Plotly in Python to create histograms, scatter plots, and bar charts. For image data, use tools that visualize images alongside their labels to check for labeling accuracy. For structured data, correlation matrices and pair plots can be highly informative. - Source: dev.to / 12 months ago
  • 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: over 1 year ago
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Streamlit mentions (210)

  • Predictive Maintenance Systems for Cleaning Robots: Boosting Efficiency Through Smart Tech
    Use Streamlit to visualize and test predictions interactively:. - Source: dev.to / 3 days ago
  • Build Code-RAGent, an agent for your codebase
    The only thing left to do then was to build something that could showcase the power of code ingestion within a vector database, and it immediately clicked in my mind: "Why don't I ingest my entire codebase of solved Go exercises from Exercism?" That's how I created Code-RAGent, your friendly coding assistant based on your personal codebases and grounded in web search. It is built on top of GPT-4.1, powered by... - Source: dev.to / about 1 month ago
  • How AI is Transforming Front-End Development in 2025!
    Streamlit.io: Great documentation and reusable components to integrate with your AI application for rapid python front-end AI development. - Source: dev.to / about 2 months ago
  • Querying DynamoDB with Natural Language Using MCP
    The agent uses MCP to translate this into a DynamoDB query. Then, using Streamlit UI, results are returned in a structured format, making it easy to use. - Source: dev.to / 3 months ago
  • Can I run this LLM?
    It's powered by something called "Streamlit" (https://streamlit.io). > A faster way to build and share data apps Website doesn't even load for me. I don't even know what to say...welcome to web dev 2025 edition. - Source: Hacker News / 3 months ago
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What are some alternatives?

When comparing Plotly and Streamlit, 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.

Anvil.works - Build seriously powerful web apps with all the flexibility of Python. No web development experience required.

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

Recut - Edit silence out of videos automatically

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

FastAPI - FastAPI is an Open Source, modern, fast (high-performance), web framework for building APIs with Python 3.6+ based on standard Python type hints.