Why developers like Plotly

What is Plotly?

Plotly.js is the only open-source JavaScript library for data visualization in the sciences and engineering. Open-source interfaces to Plotly.js are available for Python, R, MATLAB, and React.

Plotly is a tool in the Charting Libraries category of a tech stack.

Plotly is an open source tool with 10.5K GitHub stars and 1.2K GitHub forks. Here’s a link to Plotly's open source repository on GitHub

Explore Plotly's Story

Who uses Plotly?

Companies

14 companies use Plotly in their tech stacks, including Wellzesta, Algo Edge Technologies, and ADEXT.

Developers

64 developers use Plotly.

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Plotly Integrations

import.io, Python, React, MATLAB, and Julia are some of the popular tools that integrate with Plotly. Here's a list of all 7 tools that integrate with Plotly.

Why developers like Plotly?

Here’s a list of reasons why companies and developers use Plotly

Top Reasons

Impressive support for webgl 3D charts

Great support for complex and multiple axes

Integrated zoom and filter-out tools in charts and maps

Charts are easy to share with a cloud account

Powerful out-of-the-box featureset

Publication quality image export

Active user base

Beautiful visualizations

Easy to use online editor for creating plotly.js charts

Webgl chart types are extremely performant

Plotly Reviews

Here are some stack decisions, common use cases and reviews by companies and developers who chose Plotly in their tech stack.

Tim Abbott

Founder at Zulip · 2 months ago | 5 upvotes · 2.8K views

Zulip

D3.js

Plotly

We use Plotly (just their open source stuff) for Zulip's user-facing and admin-facing statistics graphs because it's a reasonably well-designed JavaScript graphing library.

If you've tried using D3.js, it's a pretty poor developer experience, and that translates to spending a bunch of time getting the graphs one wants even for things that are conceptually pretty basic. Plotly isn't amazing (it's decent), but it's way better than than D3 unless you have very specialized needs.

Aidi Tan

2 months ago | 1 upvotes · 3.2K views

D3.js

Plotly

Chart.js

Highcharts

#Visualization

Here is my stack on #Visualization. @FusionCharts and Highcharts are easy to use but only free for non-commercial. Chart.js and Plotly are two lovely tools for commercial use under the MIT license. And D3.js would be my last choice only if a complex customized plot is needed.

See all decisions

Plotly's features

Feature parity with MATLAB/matplotlib graphing
Online chart editor
Fully interactive (hover, zoom, pan)
SVG and WebGL backends
Publication-quality image export

Plotly Alternatives & Comparisons

What are some alternatives to Plotly?

Highcharts

Highcharts currently supports line, spline, area, areaspline, column, bar, pie, scatter, angular gauges, arearange, areasplinerange, columnrange, bubble, box plot, error bars, funnel, waterfall and polar chart types.

D3.js

JavaScript library for manipulating documents based on data. Emphasises on web standards gives you the full capabilities of modern browsers without tying yourself to a proprietary framework

C3.js

c3 is a D3-based reusable chart library that enables deeper integration of charts into web applications.

Chart.js

Visualize your data in 6 different ways. Each of them animated, with a load of customisation options and interactivity extensions.

amCharts

amCharts is an advanced charting library that will suit any data visualization need. Our charting solution include Column, Bar, Line, Area, Step, Step without risers, Smoothed line, Candlestick, OHLC, Pie/Donut, Radar/ Polar, XY/Scatter/Bubble, Bullet, Funnel/Pyramid charts as well as Gauges.

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