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 12K GitHub stars and 1.4K GitHub forks. Here’s a link to Plotly's open source repository on GitHub

Explore Plotly's Story

Who uses Plotly?

Companies

30 companies reportedly use Plotly in their tech stacks, including Ruangguru, tools, and Aplines.

Ruangguru

tools

Aplines

Platform

Graphai

Kinderboerderij ...

Auterion Insights ...

Smart Monitoring ...

ADEXT

Developers

170 developers on StackShare have stated that they use Plotly.

My Stack

manlikefox

My Stack

dev

My Stack

Plotly Integrations

Python, React, Jupyter, MATLAB, and Julia are some of the popular tools that integrate with Plotly. Here's a list of all 11 tools that integrate with Plotly.

Python

React

Jupyter

MATLAB

Julia

TimescaleDB ...

Streamlit

import.io

Anvil

Pros of Plotly

Integrated zoom and filter-out tools in charts and maps

Great support for complex and multiple axes

Powerful out-of-the-box featureset

Beautiful visualizations

Impressive support for webgl 3D charts

Charts are easy to share with a cloud account

Active user base

Easy to use online editor for creating plotly.js charts

Publication quality image export

Webgl chart types are extremely performant

Interactive charts

Public Decisions about Plotly

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 · a year ago | 6 upvotes · 133.1K views

Shared insights

Plotly

D3.js

Zulip

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

a year ago | 2 upvotes · 254.8K views

Shared insights

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.

Bokeh

Bokeh is an interactive visualization library for modern web browsers. It provides elegant, concise construction of versatile graphics, and affords high-performance interactivity over large or streaming datasets.

Marvel

A super simple tool that turns any image (including PSDs) or sketch into interactive prototypes for any device. Powered by Dropbox.

Matplotlib

It is a Python 2D plotting library which produces publication quality figures in a variety of hardcopy formats and interactive environments across platforms. It can be used in Python scripts, the Python and IPython shells, the Jupyter notebook, web application servers, and four graphical user interface toolkits.

Storyline

Storyline makes it easy to create, test & publish Alexa skills in minutes with a visual interface and pre-built templates.

See all alternatives

Related Comparisons