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  5. C3.js vs Highcharts vs React

C3.js vs Highcharts vs React

OverviewDecisionsComparisonAlternatives

Overview

React
React
Stacks182.9K
Followers147.0K
Votes4.1K
GitHub Stars240.3K
Forks49.7K
Highcharts
Highcharts
Stacks1.5K
Followers1.1K
Votes92
C3.js
C3.js
Stacks398
Followers163
Votes4

C3.js vs Highcharts vs React: What are the differences?

Introduction

C3.js, Highcharts, and React are popular frameworks used for data visualization on websites. However, there are key differences between them that set them apart. This Markdown code provides a concise and formatted comparison of these frameworks.

  1. Data Manipulation: C3.js provides built-in functionality for data manipulation, allowing easy aggregation, sorting, and filtering of data. Highcharts, on the other hand, requires additional libraries or custom code for data manipulation. React is a UI library and does not include specific data manipulation functionalities.

  2. Language and Syntax: C3.js and Highcharts are primarily JavaScript-based libraries, while React is a JavaScript library for building user interfaces. C3.js and Highcharts use similar syntax for defining charts and configuring options, while React utilizes JSX syntax for creating interactive components.

  3. Reactivity: React is specifically designed for building responsive and reactive user interfaces. It efficiently updates and renders components based on changes in the underlying data or state. C3.js and Highcharts, on the other hand, do not have built-in reactivity and require manual updates to reflect data changes.

  4. Customizability: Highcharts provides a wide range of customizable options and features, allowing developers to create highly tailored charts and visualizations. C3.js also offers customization options but may have less flexibility compared to Highcharts. React, being a UI library, offers extensive flexibility and customization options for designing the overall user interface but may require more effort to customize the specific charts.

  5. Integration: C3.js and Highcharts can be integrated with React, allowing developers to leverage the benefits of both libraries. However, the integration process may require additional configuration and may vary depending on the specific use case and requirements.

  6. Community and Support: Highcharts has a large and active community with extensive documentation, tutorials, and support resources available. C3.js also has a supportive community but may have slightly fewer resources compared to Highcharts. React, being one of the most popular JavaScript libraries, has a massive community and abundant resources for troubleshooting and getting help.

In summary, C3.js and Highcharts are powerful charting libraries with differences in data manipulation, syntax, reactivity, customizability, integration with React, and community support. React, being a UI library, offers extensive flexibility for building interactive user interfaces.

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Advice on React, Highcharts, C3.js

Cyrus
Cyrus

Aug 15, 2019

Needs adviceonVue.jsVue.jsReactReact

I find using Vue.js to be easier (more concise / less boilerplate) and more intuitive than writing React. However, there are a lot more readily available React components that I can just plug into my projects. I'm debating whether to use Vue.js or React for an upcoming project that I'm going to use to help teach a friend how to build an interactive frontend. Which would you recommend I use?

884k views884k
Comments
Cyrus
Cyrus

Aug 15, 2019

Needs advice

Simple datepickers are cumbersome. For such a simple data input, I feel like it takes far too much effort. Ideally, the native input[type="date"] would just work like it does on FF and Chrome, but Safari and Edge don't handle it properly. So I'm left either having a diverging experience based on the browser or I need to choose a library to implement a datepicker since users aren't good at inputing formatted strings.

For React alone there are tons of examples to use https://reactjsexample.com/tag/date/. And then of course there's the bootstrap datepicker (https://bootstrap-datepicker.readthedocs.io/en/latest/), jQueryUI calendar picker, https://github.com/flatpickr/flatpickr, and many more.

How do you recommend going about handling date and time inputs? And then there's always moment.js, but I've observed some users getting stuck when presented with a blank text field. I'm curious to hear what's worked well for people...

401k views401k
Comments
Damiano
Damiano

Oct 27, 2019

Decided

Preact offers an API which is extremely similar to React's for less than 10% of its size (and createElement is renamed to h, which makes the overall bundle a lot smaller). Although it is less compatible with other libraries than the latter (and its ecosystem is nowhere as developed), this is generally not a problem as Preact exposes the preact/compat API, which can be used as an alias both for React and ReactDOM and allows for the use of libraries which would otherwise just be compatible with React.

25.6k views25.6k
Comments

Detailed Comparison

React
React
Highcharts
Highcharts
C3.js
C3.js

Lots of people use React as the V in MVC. Since React makes no assumptions about the rest of your technology stack, it's easy to try it out on a small feature in an existing project.

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

Declarative; Component-based; Learn once, write anywhere
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;Pure Javascript - Highcharts is solely based on native browser technologies and doesn't require client side plugins like Flash or Java.
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.
Statistics
GitHub Stars
240.3K
GitHub Stars
-
GitHub Stars
-
GitHub Forks
49.7K
GitHub Forks
-
GitHub Forks
-
Stacks
182.9K
Stacks
1.5K
Stacks
398
Followers
147.0K
Followers
1.1K
Followers
163
Votes
4.1K
Votes
92
Votes
4
Pros & Cons
Pros
  • 837
    Components
  • 674
    Virtual dom
  • 579
    Performance
  • 509
    Simplicity
  • 442
    Composable
Cons
  • 42
    Requires discipline to keep architecture organized
  • 31
    No predefined way to structure your app
  • 30
    Need to be familiar with lots of third party packages
  • 14
    JSX
  • 10
    Not enterprise friendly
Pros
  • 34
    Low learning curve and powerful
  • 17
    Multiple chart types such as pie, bar, line and others
  • 13
    Responsive charts
  • 9
    Handles everything you throw at it
  • 8
    Extremely easy-to-parse documentation
Cons
  • 9
    Expensive
Pros
  • 2
    Easy to use
  • 2
    Reusable charts
Cons
  • 1
    Dependent on D3.js which is not lightweight
Integrations
No integrations availableNo integrations available
D3.js
D3.js

What are some alternatives to React, Highcharts, C3.js?

jQuery

jQuery

jQuery is a cross-platform JavaScript library designed to simplify the client-side scripting of HTML.

AngularJS

AngularJS

AngularJS lets you write client-side web applications as if you had a smarter browser. It lets you use good old HTML (or HAML, Jade and friends!) as your template language and lets you extend HTML’s syntax to express your application’s components clearly and succinctly. It automatically synchronizes data from your UI (view) with your JavaScript objects (model) through 2-way data binding.

Vue.js

Vue.js

It is a library for building interactive web interfaces. It provides data-reactive components with a simple and flexible API.

jQuery UI

jQuery UI

Whether you're building highly interactive web applications or you just need to add a date picker to a form control, jQuery UI is the perfect choice.

D3.js

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.

Svelte

Svelte

If you've ever built a JavaScript application, the chances are you've encountered – or at least heard of – frameworks like React, Angular, Vue and Ractive. Like Svelte, these tools all share a goal of making it easy to build slick interactive user interfaces. Rather than interpreting your application code at run time, your app is converted into ideal JavaScript at build time. That means you don't pay the performance cost of the framework's abstractions, or incur a penalty when your app first loads.

Flux

Flux

Flux is the application architecture that Facebook uses for building client-side web applications. It complements React's composable view components by utilizing a unidirectional data flow. It's more of a pattern rather than a formal framework, and you can start using Flux immediately without a lot of new code.

Famo.us

Famo.us

Famo.us is a free and open source JavaScript platform for building mobile apps and desktop experiences. What makes Famo.us unique is its JavaScript rendering engine and 3D physics engine that gives developers the power and tools to build native quality apps and animations using pure JavaScript.

Plotly.js

Plotly.js

It is a standalone Javascript data visualization library, and it also powers the Python and R modules named plotly in those respective ecosystems (referred to as Plotly.py and Plotly.R). It can be used to produce dozens of chart types and visualizations, including statistical charts, 3D graphs, scientific charts, SVG and tile maps, financial charts and more.

Riot

Riot

Riot brings custom tags to all browsers. Think React + Polymer but with enjoyable syntax and a small learning curve.

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