React VS D3.js

Compare React VS D3.js and see what are their differences

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React

A JavaScript library for building user interfaces

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.

Landing page //
2023-04-19

Landing page //
2023-07-11

D3 allows you to bind arbitrary data to a Document Object Model (DOM), and then apply data-driven transformations to the document. For example, you can use D3 to generate an HTML table from an array of numbers. Or, use the same data to create an interactive SVG bar chart with smooth transitions and interaction.

D3 is not a monolithic framework that seeks to provide every conceivable feature. Instead, D3 solves the crux of the problem: efficient manipulation of documents based on data. This avoids proprietary representation and affords extraordinary flexibility, exposing the full capabilities of web standards such as HTML, SVG, and CSS. With minimal overhead, D3 is extremely fast, supporting large datasets and dynamic behaviors for interaction and animation. D3’s functional style allows code reuse through a diverse collection of official and community-developed modules.

React

Website: reactjs.org
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Platforms: -

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D3.js

Website: d3js.org
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Platforms: JavaScript

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React features and specs

Component-Based Architecture
React encourages the creation of reusable UI components, which can be leveraged to build complex user interfaces efficiently. This promotes better code organization and separation of concerns.
Virtual DOM
React uses a virtual DOM to optimize and accelerate the process of updating the browser’s DOM, significantly improving application performance.
Strong Community and Ecosystem
React has a large and active community, which means plenty of third-party libraries, tools, and community support are readily available to assist developers.
JSX Syntax
React’s JSX syntax allows developers to write HTML structures within JavaScript code, making the code more readable and easier to debug.
Unidirectional Data Flow
React promotes a unidirectional data flow, which helps maintain the predictability and ease of debugging, especially for larger applications.
Extensive Documentation
React's official documentation is comprehensive, well-organized, and provides numerous examples and tutorials to help developers get started and advance their skills.

Possible disadvantages of React

Steep Learning Curve
React comes with a steep learning curve for beginners, especially those unfamiliar with JavaScript ES6 and JSX syntax.
Boilerplate Code
Setting up a React project often requires boilerplate code, which can be cumbersome and time-consuming compared to simpler frameworks.
Fast-Paced Development
React and its associated libraries evolve rapidly, necessitating frequent updates and learning new patterns, which can be overwhelming for developers.
Complexity in Larger Applications
As a React application grows in size, managing state and props across components can become complex, sometimes necessitating additional state management libraries like Redux or Context API.
SEO Challenges
React, being a JavaScript library, can present challenges for search engine optimization (SEO) due to Googlebot's limitations in executing JavaScript, although this can be mitigated with server-side rendering (SSR) or static site generation (SSG).

D3.js features and specs

Powerful Visualization
D3.js allows for the creation of highly customized and interactive data visualizations, harnessing the full power of web standards like SVG, Canvas, and HTML.
Data Binding
It offers robust support for data-driven transformations and binding, enabling intuitive connections between data sets and DOM elements.
Community and Ecosystem
A large and active community contributes to tutorials, plugins, and tools, which can significantly simplify the development process.
Flexibility
D3.js is highly flexible, providing low-level manipulation capabilities without being tied to any specific chart types or patterns.
Performance
It is highly optimized for performance, allowing for efficient rendering of complex visualizations even with large data sets.

Possible disadvantages of D3.js

Steep Learning Curve
D3.js has a steep learning curve due to its low-level nature and requires a solid understanding of JavaScript, DOM manipulation, and data concepts.
Complexity
Creating complex visualizations can be time-consuming and require a significant amount of custom code, making it less approachable for quick, simple tasks.
Browser Compatibility
Although widely supported, some D3.js features may have inconsistent behavior across different browsers, requiring additional testing and debugging.
Documentation
While extensive, D3.js documentation can be challenging for beginners to navigate and understand, causing misunderstandings and slower development times.
Dependency Management
The library itself is modular, but managing dependencies and integrating D3.js with other JavaScript frameworks or libraries can sometimes be problematic.

Analysis of React

Overall verdict

React is generally considered a good choice for developing modern web applications. Its performance, large community, extensive ecosystem, and ease of integration with other technologies make it a compelling option for many developers. However, whether it's the best choice depends on the specific requirements and constraints of your project.

Why this product is good

React is a popular JavaScript library for building user interfaces, particularly single-page applications where a dynamic and responsive interface is essential. It is maintained by Facebook and a community of individual developers and companies. React's component-based architecture allows for reusable and self-contained components, making development more efficient and scalable. Features like the Virtual DOM improve performance by updating only the necessary parts of the UI.

Recommended for

Developers looking to build interactive user interfaces
Projects requiring fast rendering and dynamic updates
Applications that will benefit from component reusability and maintainability
Teams interested in leveraging a rich ecosystem and community support
Projects intending to use React Native for mobile app development in conjunction

Analysis of D3.js

Overall verdict

Yes, D3.js is a highly regarded library for data visualization in the web development community.

Why this product is good

Flexibility: D3.js provides incredible flexibility in creating complex and interactive visualizations with web standards (SVG, HTML, and CSS).
Customization: It allows for high levels of customization, which lets developers create unique and detailed visualizations tailored to their specific needs.
Community and Ecosystem: D3.js has a large, active community and a rich ecosystem of plugins and extensions conducive to learning and integration.
Data Binding: Offers powerful ways to manipulate documents based on data; the data-driven approach simplifies dynamic interaction creation.
Performance: Efficiently manipulates DOM elements and performs well with large datasets if used correctly.

Recommended for

Data Scientists and Analysts looking to create custom, interactive visualizations.
Web Developers who need to incorporate complex data visualizations into applications.
Educators and Researchers presenting data in an engaging way.
Anyone needing to build bespoke visualizations that are not possible with off-the-shelf solutions.

React videos

+ Add

What Is React?

D3.js videos

+ Add

Data Visualization with D3.js - Full Tutorial Course

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to React and D3.js)

React

D3.js

Javascript UI Libraries

84 84%

Javascript UI Libraries

16% 16

Charting Libraries

0 0%

Charting Libraries

100% 100

Developer Tools

100 100%

Developer Tools

0% 0

Data Visualization

0 0%

Data Visualization

100% 100

User comments

Share your experience with using React and D3.js. For example, how are they different and which one is better?

Reviews

These are some of the external sources and on-site user reviews we've used to compare React and D3.js

React Reviews

Top JavaScript Frameworks in 2025

ReactJS is a JavaScript based UI development library which is developed by Facebook. It is an open-source framework which is widely used by developers for web development. One of the major reasons why React.JS is widely popular is because it uses Virtual DOM. This enables developers to create web applications faster.

Source: solguruz.com

The 20 Best Laravel Alternatives for Web Development

React’s the cool kid on the block, turning heads since Facebook dropped it at our feet. Building dynamic user interfaces feels less like coding, more like crafting with this JavaScript library.

Source: tms-outsource.com

Top 9 best Frameworks for web development

React uses a virtual DOM to optimize the performance of UI updates and follows a one-way data flow for easy tracking of data changes. With its active community and abundance of third-party resources and libraries, React is a solid choice for web development.

Source: www.kiwop.com

9 Best JavaScript Frameworks to Use in 2023

React can be used as a base in the development of single-page or mobile applications. However, React is concerned with rendering data to the DOM, so creating React apps usually requires additional libraries for state management, routing, and interaction with an API.

Source: ninetailed.io

JavaScript: What Are The Most Used Frameworks For This Language?

Some of its top features include server-side rendering, automatic code splitting, client-side routing, built-in CSS support, static site generation and API routes. Overall, Next.JS is a powerful and flexible framework that provides developers with a simple and intuitive way to build complex React applications with ease. It is widely used in the React community and has a...

Source: www.bocasay.com

D3.js Reviews

6 JavaScript Charting Libraries for Powerful Data Visualizations in 2023

Depending on your requirements, the best JavaScript library is D3.js, as it’s by far the most customizable. However, it’s also really complex and difficult to master. Plus, it’s not as compatible with TypeScript as it is with JavaScript, which can be off-putting for some developers. If you’d prefer a less complex library that you can use with TypeScript, ECharts, and...

Source: embeddable.com

15 JavaScript Libraries for Creating Beautiful Charts

When we think of charting today, D3.js is the first name that comes up. Being an open source project, D3.js definitely brings many powerful features that were missing in most of the existing libraries. Features like dynamic properties, Enter and Exit, powerful transitions, and syntax familiarity with jQuery make it one the best JavaScript libraries for charting. Charts in...

Source: www.sitepoint.com

Top 20 Javascript Libraries

D3 stands for Data-Driven Documents. With D3, you can apply data-driven transformations to DOM objects. The keyword with D3 is ‘data-driven,’ which means documents are manipulated depending on the data received. Data can be received in any format and bound with DOM objects. D3 is very fast and supports dynamic behavior for animation and interactions. There are plenty of...

Source: hackr.io

20+ JavaScript libraries to draw your own diagrams (2022 edition)

D3.js is a JavaScript library for manipulating documents based on data. Right now, I would say is the most popular library of its kind.

Source: modeling-languages.com

15 data science tools to consider using in 2021

Another open source tool, D3.js is a JavaScript library for creating custom data visualizations in a web browser. Commonly known as D3, which stands for Data-Driven Documents, it uses web standards, such as HTML, Scalable Vector Graphics and CSS, instead of its own graphical vocabulary. D3's developers describe it as a dynamic and flexible tool that requires a minimum amount...

Source: searchbusinessanalytics.techtarget.com

Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, React should be more popular than D3.js. It has been mentiond 814 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.

React mentions (814)

Indie Hacking with Open Source Tools: Innovating on a Budget
One inspiring example is a developer building a "Todoist Clone" using a combination of React, Node.js, and MongoDB. The developer tapped into open source libraries and community support to create a highly responsive task management application. This project underscores how indie hackers can achieve rapid development and adaptation with minimal budget – a theme echoed in several indie hacking success stories. - Source: dev.to / about 2 months ago
Next.js Localization: How to Build a Multilingual Website with Next-Intl
Next.js is a very popular framework built on top of the React.js library and it provides the best Development Experience for building applications. It offers a bunch of features like:. - Source: dev.to / about 2 months ago
Web Development Using React Framework
Explore the official React documentation. - Source: dev.to / 2 months ago
Monorepo Tutorial With Lerna, Storybook & Next.js
We’ll be creating the components package inside the packages directory. In this monorepo package, we’ll be building React components which will be consumed by our Next.js application (front-end package). - Source: dev.to / 3 months ago
Migrating from AngularJS to React
After evaluating our options including upgrading from AngularJS to Angular (the name for every version of Angular 2 and beyond) or migrating and rewriting our application in a completely new JavaScript framework: React. We ultimately chose to go with ReactJS. - Source: dev.to / 3 months ago

D3.js mentions (167)

IO Devices and Latency
Do you mean something for data visualization, or tricks condensing large data sets with cursors? https://d3js.org/ Best of luck =3. - Source: Hacker News / 3 months ago
2024 Nuxt3 Annual Ecosystem Summary🚀
Document address: D3.js Official Document. - Source: dev.to / 6 months ago
100+ Must-Have Web Development Resources
D3.js: One of the most popular JavaScript visualization libraries. - Source: dev.to / 8 months ago
What are npm Peer Dependencies and how to use them?
A Dependency is an npm package that our code depends on in order to be able to run. Some popular packages that can be added as dependencies are lodash, D3, and chartjs. - Source: dev.to / 8 months ago
Introducing RacingBars 📊
RacingBars is an open-source, light-weight (~45kb gzipped), easy-to-use, and feature-rich javascript library for bar chart race, based on D3.js. - Source: dev.to / 10 months ago