What is Plotly?
Who uses Plotly?
Plotly Integrations
Why developers like Plotly?
Here are some stack decisions, common use cases and reviews by companies and developers who chose Plotly in their tech stack.
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.
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.
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