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 11K GitHub stars and 1.3K GitHub forks. Here’s a link to Plotly's open source repository on GitHub

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Who uses Plotly?

Companies

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

Wellzesta

Algo Edge Technologies ...

Developers

79 developers on StackShare have stated that they use Plotly.

My Stack

Plotly Integrations

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

Why developers like Plotly?

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

Top Reasons

Great support for complex and multiple axes

Integrated zoom and filter-out tools in charts and maps

Impressive support for webgl 3D charts

Beautiful visualizations

Powerful out-of-the-box featureset

Charts are easy to share with a cloud account

Active user base

Publication quality image export

Easy to use online editor for creating plotly.js charts

Webgl chart types are extremely performant

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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 · 7 months ago | 5 upvotes · 22.6K views

Zulip

Plotly

D3.js

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

6 months ago | 1 upvotes · 52.9K views

Highcharts

Chart.js

Plotly

D3.js

#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.

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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

It is an interactive visualization library that targets modern web browsers for presentation. Its goal is to provide elegant, concise construction of versatile graphics, and to extend this capability with high-performance interactivity over very large or streaming datasets. It can help anyone who would like to quickly and easily create interactive plots, dashboards, and data applications.

D3.js

It is a 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.

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.

See all alternatives

Related Comparisons

Highcharts

Plotly