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Highcharts vs Plotly: What are the differences?
Developers describe Highcharts as "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. On the other hand, Plotly is detailed as "The Web's fastest growing charting libraries". 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.
Highcharts and Plotly belong to "Charting Libraries" category of the tech stack.
Some of the features offered by Highcharts are:
- 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
On the other hand, Plotly provides the following key features:
- Feature parity with MATLAB/matplotlib graphing
- Online chart editor
- Fully interactive (hover, zoom, pan)
"Low learning curve and powerful" is the top reason why over 26 developers like Highcharts, while over 3 developers mention "Bindings to popular languages like Python, Node, R, etc" as the leading cause for choosing Plotly.
Highcharts and Plotly are both open source tools. Plotly with 10.3K GitHub stars and 1.2K forks on GitHub appears to be more popular than Highcharts with 8.75K GitHub stars and 2.31K GitHub forks.
According to the StackShare community, Highcharts has a broader approval, being mentioned in 213 company stacks & 38 developers stacks; compared to Plotly, which is listed in 11 company stacks and 10 developer stacks.
What is Highcharts?
What is Plotly?
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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.
Highchartsused highcharts for my charting needs on and off for various clients through out the years. just it recently on a project.
HighchartsTranslating saved user data that's returned from the database into useful, visually appealing user feedback.
HighchartsHighcharts provided the best tradeoff between customization and pre-built chart coverage
HighchartsMakes dynamic graphing so much easier.
PlotlyAnalytics presentation layer.
HighchartsStream Data Charts