C3.js vs Highcharts: What are the differences?

C3.js: A D3-based reusable chart library. c3 is a D3-based reusable chart library that enables deeper integration of charts into web applications; Highcharts: A charting library written in pure JavaScript, offering an easy way of adding interactive charts to your web site or web application. 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.

C3.js and Highcharts belong to "Charting Libraries" category of the tech stack.

Some of the features offered by C3.js are:

• Comfortable - C3 makes it easy to generate D3-based charts by wrapping the code required to construct the entire chart. We don't need to write D3 code any more.
• Customizable - C3 gives some classes to each element when generating, so you can define a custom style by the class and it's possible to extend the structure directly by D3.
• Controllable - C3 provides a variety of APIs and callbacks to access the state of the chart. By using them, you can update the chart even if after it's rendered.

On the other hand, Highcharts provides the following key features:

• It works in all modern mobile and desktop browsers including the iPhone/iPad and Internet Explorer from version 6
• Free for non-commercial
• One of the key features of Highcharts is that under any of the licenses, free or not, you are allowed to download the source code and make your own edits

C3.js and Highcharts are both open source tools. It seems that Highcharts with 8.75K GitHub stars and 2.31K forks on GitHub has more adoption than C3.js with 8.4K GitHub stars and 1.39K GitHub forks.

Webedia, WebbyLab, and Treehouse are some of the popular companies that use Highcharts, whereas C3.js is used by Key Location, Helpful, and Cask. Highcharts has a broader approval, being mentioned in 213 company stacks & 38 developers stacks; compared to C3.js, which is listed in 20 company stacks and 5 developer stacks.