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Plotly VS WeasyPrint

Compare Plotly VS WeasyPrint and see what are their differences

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Plotly logo Plotly

Low-Code Data Apps

WeasyPrint logo WeasyPrint

WeasyPrint is a visual rendering engine for HTML and CSS that can export to PDF.
  • Plotly Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-07-31
  • WeasyPrint Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-10-09

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.

WeasyPrint features and specs

  • Ease of Use
    WeasyPrint is designed to be simple and user-friendly, making it easy for developers to generate PDF documents from HTML and CSS without complex configurations.
  • CSS Support
    It supports modern CSS standards, allowing developers to style their documents in a way that closely mirrors how they would style web pages.
  • Quality Output
    WeasyPrint produces high-quality PDFs with precise layout and text rendering, suitable for professional use.
  • Open Source
    Being an open-source tool, WeasyPrint is free to use and has a community that contributes to its continuous development and improvement.
  • Python Integration
    WeasyPrint is written in Python and integrates seamlessly with Python applications, making it suitable for Python developers.

Possible disadvantages of WeasyPrint

  • Performance
    WeasyPrint can be slower compared to some other PDF generation tools, particularly with large or complex documents.
  • Limited JavaScript Support
    It lacks full JavaScript execution support, meaning dynamic content generation via JavaScript is not possible.
  • Dependencies
    WeasyPrint requires several system dependencies, which might complicate installation and deployment.
  • Feature Gaps
    Certain advanced PDF features, such as forms or annotations, may not be fully supported by WeasyPrint.
  • Community and Support
    While active, the community is smaller compared to some commercial solutions, which may affect the availability of support resources.

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.

Plotly videos

+ Add

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

WeasyPrint videos

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

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Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Plotly and WeasyPrint)

Plotly

WeasyPrint

Data Visualization
100 100%
Data Visualization
0% 0
HTML To PDF
0 0%
HTML To PDF
100% 100
Charting Libraries
100 100%
Charting Libraries
0% 0
PDF Tools
0 0%
PDF Tools
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 WeasyPrint

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.
Source: www.technotification.com
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...
Source: www.geeksforgeeks.org
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.
Source: blog.logrocket.com

WeasyPrint Reviews

We have no reviews of WeasyPrint yet.
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Social recommendations and mentions

WeasyPrint might be a bit more popular than Plotly. We know about 39 links to it since March 2021 and only 34 links to Plotly. 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 (34)

  • How to Analyze 47 Million Hacker News Posts: A Data Scientist's Dream Dataset Just Got Better
    Let's dive into some practical examples. First, you'll need to set up your environment with the right tools. I recommend using pandas for data manipulation and plotly for visualization. - Source: dev.to / 6 months ago
  • 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 / over 1 year 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 / over 1 year 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 / almost 2 years 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 / about 2 years ago
View more

WeasyPrint mentions (39)

  • wkhtmltopdf is archived with an open CVE — a field guide to moving off it
    If your documents are print-oriented (invoices, contracts, statements), your templates don't Run JavaScript, and you're on Python — WeasyPrint is the closest Thing to a spiritual successor: a real @page-first CSS engine, no browser process at all, Excellent page-break control, actively maintained. - Source: dev.to / 12 days ago
  • Render an HTML Table to PNG in Python (5 Ways, 2026)
    WeasyPrint comes up in every "HTML to image" search, so it's worth being precise: it's an excellent, actively-maintained pure-Python engine — but it renders to PDF only (PNG export was removed in v53) and runs no JavaScript. If your table is static HTML/CSS and you actually want a PDF, WeasyPrint is a great, dependency-light choice and you don't need any of the above. If you need a PNG, or your table/chart is... - Source: dev.to / 3 months ago
  • Ask HN: What is nowadays (opensource) way of converting HTML to PDF?
    Just print to PDF in a browser, or automate that using a browser automation tool. For a non-browser-based open source solution, WeasyPrint. https://weasyprint.org/ For a proprietary solution, try Prince XML: https://www.princexml.com/. - Source: Hacker News / 11 months ago
  • Show HN: PlutoPrint – Generate Beautiful PDFs and PNGs from HTML with Python
    How does it differ from https://weasyprint.org ? - Source: Hacker News / about 1 year ago
  • Lyon Drops Microsoft to Boost Digital Sovereignty
    You can learn more about weasyprint on their website (https://weasyprint.org/ ). It's an open source Python package that can be launched using cli or from Python code. - Source: Hacker News / about 1 year ago
View more

What are some alternatives?

When comparing Plotly and WeasyPrint, 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.

wkhtmltopdf - wkhtmltopdf is an open source (LGPL) command line tools to render HTML into PDF and various image...

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

DocRaptor - As the only API powered by the Prince HTML-to-PDF engine, DocRaptor provides the best support for complex PDFs with powerful support for headers, page breaks, page numbers, flexbox, watermarks, accessible PDFs, and much more

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.

PDFShift - Convert any HTML documents to high-fidelity PDF using a single POST request

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