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  1. Stackups
  2. Business Tools
  3. UI Components
  4. Charting Libraries
  5. Highcharts vs Kendo UI vs Plotly

Highcharts vs Kendo UI vs Plotly

OverviewDecisionsComparisonAlternatives

Overview

Highcharts
Highcharts
Stacks1.5K
Followers1.1K
Votes92
Plotly.js
Plotly.js
Stacks399
Followers694
Votes69
GitHub Stars17.9K
Forks1.9K
Kendo UI
Kendo UI
Stacks297
Followers359
Votes33
GitHub Stars2.6K
Forks1.9K

Highcharts vs Kendo UI vs Plotly: What are the differences?

  1. Customization: Highcharts provides a wide range of customization options for charts, including chart types, styles, axes, labels, and tooltip formats. Kendo UI offers a variety of themes and templates for customization, while Plotly focuses on providing interactive plots and dashboards with customization options for colors, labels, and annotations.

  2. Data Visualization: Highcharts specializes in interactive charts with a variety of options for displaying data, such as line, bar, pie, and scatter plots. Kendo UI focuses more on a broader range of UI components beyond data visualization, including grids, calendars, and dropdowns. Plotly emphasizes creating complex and interactive visualizations with support for 3D plots, maps, and scientific charts.

  3. Compatibility: Highcharts supports a wide range of platforms and frameworks, including JavaScript, React, Angular, and Vue.js. Kendo UI is designed to integrate seamlessly with jQuery, Angular, React, and Vue.js for creating web applications. Plotly offers compatibility with Python, R, JavaScript, and various frameworks for creating interactive plots and dashboards.

  4. Community Support: Highcharts has a large community of developers and contributors who provide extensive documentation, examples, and support through forums and GitHub. Kendo UI offers comprehensive documentation, tutorials, and forums for developers to get assistance and share their experiences. Plotly has a growing community that actively contributes to its open-source libraries, providing support through documentation and forums.

  5. License and Pricing: Highcharts offers a free version for non-commercial use under the Creative Commons license, along with paid licenses for commercial projects. Kendo UI provides both open-source and commercial licenses with additional features and support for enterprise applications. Plotly offers open-source libraries for public use and commercial licenses for private projects with advanced features and support.

  6. Performance and Speed: Highcharts is known for its fast rendering capabilities and optimized performance for handling large datasets in real-time. Kendo UI is optimized for performance and scalability in data-intensive applications with seamless navigation and interaction. Plotly focuses on providing high-performance visualizations with smooth animations and responsiveness for complex charts and dashboards.

In Summary, Highcharts offers extensive customization options for interactive charts, while Kendo UI provides a variety of UI components beyond data visualization, and Plotly specializes in creating complex and interactive visualizations for scientific and data-driven applications.

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Advice on Highcharts, Plotly.js, Kendo UI

Steve
Steve

Lead Software Tools Engineer at Leonardo UK

Oct 30, 2020

Review

I would specifically recommend basing your application on Pandas which will handle the vast majority of the work for you. You will be amazed at what you will be able to get done with only a few lines of code.

Pandas can load the data from either Excel xslx files or csv files (and a lot of other places)

If you structure your code well you can have a cross platform command line program, a GUI desktop program, a Jupyter Notebook and a web service all with the vast majority of the code in common.

A jupyter notebook is a great place to start developing your code and may be all that you need.

Some plug-ins & resources that can help:

  • pandas-summary (for a rapid overview of the data): https://github.com/mouradmourafiq/pandas-summary
  • pandasgui (for exploring what you would like to do): https://github.com/adamerose/pandasgui
  • Pandas-Bokeh (plotting): https://github.com/PatrikHlobil/Pandas-Bokeh
  • plot.ly (plotting): https://plotly.com/python/pandas-backend/
  • wxPython (for a desktop GUI): https://wxpython.org/
8.84k views8.84k
Comments
Shaik
Shaik

Feb 18, 2020

Needs advice

I have used highcharts and it is pretty awesome for my previous project. now as I am about to start my new project I want to use other charting libraries such as recharts, chart js, Nivo, d3 js.... my upcoming project might use react js as front end and laravel as a backend technology. the project would be of hotel management type. please suggest me the best charts to use

247k views247k
Comments

Detailed Comparison

Highcharts
Highcharts
Plotly.js
Plotly.js
Kendo UI
Kendo UI

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.

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.

Fast, light, complete: 70+ jQuery-based UI widgets in one powerful toolset. AngularJS integration, Bootstrap support, mobile controls, offline data solution.

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.
Feature parity with MATLAB/matplotlib graphing; Online chart editor; Fully interactive (hover, zoom, pan); SVG and WebGL backends; Publication-quality image export
Ultimate Performance with Minimum Resources;Mobile-Friendly and Responsive;Built-In, Customizable Themes ;Open Source Core
Statistics
GitHub Stars
-
GitHub Stars
17.9K
GitHub Stars
2.6K
GitHub Forks
-
GitHub Forks
1.9K
GitHub Forks
1.9K
Stacks
1.5K
Stacks
399
Stacks
297
Followers
1.1K
Followers
694
Followers
359
Votes
92
Votes
69
Votes
33
Pros & Cons
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
  • 16
    Bindings to popular languages like Python, Node, R, etc
  • 10
    Integrated zoom and filter-out tools in charts and maps
  • 9
    Great support for complex and multiple axes
  • 8
    Powerful out-of-the-box featureset
  • 6
    Beautiful visualizations
Cons
  • 18
    Terrible document
Pros
  • 15
    Collection of controls
  • 5
    Speed
  • 4
    Multi-framework support
  • 4
    Mobile
  • 2
    Built-in router
Cons
  • 4
    Massive footprint
  • 3
    Slow
  • 1
    Poor customizability
  • 1
    Awdawd
  • 1
    Expensive
Integrations
No integrations available
Python
Python
React
React
MATLAB
MATLAB
Jupyter
Jupyter
Julia
Julia
Bootstrap
Bootstrap
AngularJS
AngularJS

What are some alternatives to Highcharts, Plotly.js, Kendo UI?

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.

React

React

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.

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.

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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