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  1. Stackups
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  4. Charting Libraries
  5. Highcharts vs Plotly vs Vue.js

Highcharts vs Plotly vs Vue.js

OverviewDecisionsComparisonAlternatives

Overview

Highcharts
Highcharts
Stacks1.5K
Followers1.1K
Votes92
Plotly.js
Plotly.js
Stacks399
Followers694
Votes69
GitHub Stars17.9K
Forks1.9K
Vue.js
Vue.js
Stacks55.5K
Followers44.7K
Votes1.6K
GitHub Stars209.7K
Forks33.8K

Highcharts vs Plotly vs Vue.js: What are the differences?

Introduction

Highcharts, Plotly, and Vue.js are all popular frameworks used for data visualization in web applications. In this analysis, we will highlight the key differences between Highcharts and Plotly, as well as Highcharts and Vue.js.

  1. Charting Library:

    Highcharts is a JavaScript charting library that provides a wide range of customizable chart types, including line, bar, area, pie, scatter, and more. It offers comprehensive configuration options and excels in creating interactive charts with features like tooltips and zooming. On the other hand, Plotly is a JavaScript data visualization library that supports various chart types, including line, scatter, bar, pie, heatmaps, and more. It focuses on creating highly interactive and shareable visualizations. Vue.js, on the other hand, is a JavaScript framework for building user interfaces, which can be used with either Highcharts or Plotly to create data visualizations.

  2. Integration with Frameworks:

    Highcharts integrates well with various front-end frameworks like Angular, React, and Vue.js, allowing developers to easily incorporate its charts into their applications. Plotly also provides integrations, but it also has its own built-in dashboards and can be used standalone with JavaScript. In comparison, Vue.js is a complete framework that can be used with Highcharts or Plotly to build interactive and responsive data visualizations.

  3. Customization and Configuration:

    Highcharts offers an extensive API for customizing charts, including options for styling, adding annotations, and manipulating data. It provides a wide range of configuration options and can be customized at a highly granular level. Plotly, on the other hand, offers fewer customization options compared to Highcharts but makes up for it with its focus on interactivity, allowing users to zoom, pan, and hover over data points. Vue.js, being a framework, provides a flexible environment for customizing and configuring both Highcharts and Plotly visuals.

  4. Data Handling and Visualization:

    Highcharts provides a robust data handling mechanism, allowing developers to easily work with data from various sources like JSON, CSV, or live feeds. It provides built-in data preprocessing options like sorting, filtering, and aggregating data. Plotly, on the other hand, also supports easy data integration from various sources but excels in creating visualizations with real-time data and streaming updates. Vue.js acts as a facilitator in both cases and provides an easy way to work with data in Highcharts and Plotly.

  5. Community and Support:

    Highcharts has been around for a longer time and has a larger user base, hence it has a more extensive and active community. It provides comprehensive documentation, forums, and support channels for developers. Plotly, although not as mature as Highcharts, has been gaining popularity and also has an active community. Vue.js also has a strong and growing community, providing support for developers working with both Highcharts and Plotly.

  6. Licensing and Pricing:

    Highcharts offers both a free version and a commercial license for using their library. The free version has some limitations and requires attribution. Plotly, on the other hand, offers open-source libraries as well as a cloud service with different pricing plans. Vue.js is an open-source framework and is free to use. The overall offering and pricing structure differ for Highcharts, Plotly, and Vue.js.

In summary, Highcharts is a powerful, customizable, and widely-used charting library with extensive community support. Plotly, although less mature, focuses on interactivity and provides built-in dashboards. Vue.js acts as a framework that can be used with both Highcharts and Plotly to build powerful and responsive data visualizations.

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Advice on Highcharts, Plotly.js, Vue.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
Simon
Simon

Senior Fullstack Developer at QUANTUSflow Software GmbH

Apr 22, 2020

DecidedonVuetifyVuetifyVue.jsVue.jsNuxt.jsNuxt.js

Our whole Vue.js frontend stack (incl. SSR) consists of the following tools:

  • @{Nuxt.js}|tool:7304| consisting of @{Vue CLI}|tool:9559|, @{Vue Router}|tool:6932|, @{vuex}|tool:6705|, @{Webpack}|tool:1682| and @{Sass}|tool:1171| (Bundler for @{HTML5}|tool:2538|, @{CSS 3}|tool:6727|), @{Babel}|tool:2739| (Transpiler for @{JavaScript}|tool:1209|),
  • Vue Styleguidist as our style guide and pool of developed @{Vue.js}|tool:3837| components
  • @{Vuetify}|tool:6163| as Material Component Framework (for fast app development)
  • @{TypeScript}|tool:1612| as programming language
  • @{Apollo}|tool:5508| / @{GraphQL}|tool:3820| (incl. @{GraphiQL}|tool:7879|) for data access layer (https://apollo.vuejs.org/)
  • @{ESLint}|tool:3337|, @{TSLint}|tool:5561| and @{Prettier}|tool:7035| for coding style and code analyzes
  • @{Jest}|tool:830| as testing framework
  • @{Google Fonts}|tool:2652| and @{Font Awesome}|tool:3244| for typography and icon toolkit
  • @{NativeScript-Vue}|tool:9623| for mobile development

The main reason we have chosen Vue.js over React and AngularJS is related to the following artifacts:

  • Empowered HTML. Vue.js has many similar approaches with Angular. This helps to optimize HTML blocks handling with the use of different components.
  • Detailed documentation. Vue.js has very good documentation which can fasten learning curve for developers.
  • Adaptability. It provides a rapid switching period from other frameworks. It has similarities with Angular and React in terms of design and architecture.
  • Awesome integration. Vue.js can be used for both building single-page applications and more difficult web interfaces of apps. Smaller interactive parts can be easily integrated into the existing infrastructure with no negative effect on the entire system.
  • Large scaling. Vue.js can help to develop pretty large reusable templates.
  • Tiny size. Vue.js weights around 20KB keeping its speed and flexibility. It allows reaching much better performance in comparison to other frameworks.
5.13M views5.13M
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

Detailed Comparison

Highcharts
Highcharts
Plotly.js
Plotly.js
Vue.js
Vue.js

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.

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

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
Reactivity; Components; Modularity; Animations; Routing; Stability; Extendable Data bindings; Plain JS object models; Build UI by composing components; Mix & matching small libraries
Statistics
GitHub Stars
-
GitHub Stars
17.9K
GitHub Stars
209.7K
GitHub Forks
-
GitHub Forks
1.9K
GitHub Forks
33.8K
Stacks
1.5K
Stacks
399
Stacks
55.5K
Followers
1.1K
Followers
694
Followers
44.7K
Votes
92
Votes
69
Votes
1.6K
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
  • 294
    Simple and easy to start with
  • 230
    Good documentation
  • 196
    Components
  • 131
    Simple the best
  • 100
    Simplified AngularJS
Cons
  • 9
    Less Common Place
  • 5
    YXMLvsHTML Markup
  • 3
    Only support programatically multiple root nodes
  • 3
    Don't support fragments
Integrations
No integrations available
Python
Python
React
React
MATLAB
MATLAB
Jupyter
Jupyter
Julia
Julia
No integrations available

What are some alternatives to Highcharts, Plotly.js, Vue.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.

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.

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.

Ember.js

Ember.js

A JavaScript framework that does all of the heavy lifting that you'd normally have to do by hand. There are tasks that are common to every web app; It does those things for you, so you can focus on building killer features and UI.

Backbone.js

Backbone.js

Backbone supplies structure to JavaScript-heavy applications by providing models key-value binding and custom events, collections with a rich API of enumerable functions, views with declarative event handling, and connects it all to your existing application over a RESTful JSON interface.

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.

Angular

Angular

It is a TypeScript-based open-source web application framework. It is a development platform for building mobile and desktop web applications.

Aurelia

Aurelia

Aurelia is a next generation JavaScript client framework that leverages simple conventions to empower your creativity.

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