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  5. Highcharts vs React

Highcharts vs React

OverviewDecisionsComparisonAlternatives

Overview

React
React
Stacks182.6K
Followers147.0K
Votes4.1K
GitHub Stars240.3K
Forks49.7K
Highcharts
Highcharts
Stacks1.5K
Followers1.1K
Votes92

Highcharts vs React: What are the differences?

Key Differences between Highcharts and React

Highcharts and React are both popular tools used in web development, but they serve different purposes and have distinct features. Here are the key differences between Highcharts and React:

  1. Rendering Approach: Highcharts is a JavaScript charting library that provides ready-to-use charts out of the box. It uses HTML5 to render the charts on the client-side, allowing for smooth and interactive visualizations. On the other hand, React is a JavaScript library primarily used for building user interfaces. It utilizes a virtual DOM and a component-based architecture to efficiently update and render UI elements.

  2. Data Visualization: Highcharts is focused on providing a wide range of charts and visualizations, such as line charts, bar charts, pie charts, and more. It offers various customizable options for styling and rendering the data. React, on the other hand, is not specifically designed for data visualization. While it can be used to build charts and graphs with additional libraries or components, it does not have built-in charting capabilities like Highcharts.

  3. Integration: Highcharts can be easily integrated into any web project by including the Highcharts library and initializing the charts using JavaScript code. It can be used with any JavaScript framework or library, including React. React, on the other hand, can be seamlessly integrated into any web application by incorporating it into the project's existing JavaScript codebase.

  4. Component-based Architecture: React follows a component-based architecture where UI elements are organized into reusable and independent components. This modular approach allows for better code reusability, maintainability, and scalability. Highcharts, on the other hand, does not follow a component-based architecture. It provides charting functionalities as a standalone library that can be utilized within components built using any framework, including React.

  5. Community and Ecosystem: React has a large and active community of developers, along with a thriving ecosystem of libraries, tools, and resources. This extensive community support makes it easier to find solutions to common problems and access a wide range of reusable components. Highcharts also has a significant community following, but it is mainly focused on charting and data visualization-related discussions.

  6. Learning Curve: React has a steeper learning curve compared to Highcharts, especially for beginners or developers new to JavaScript frameworks. React requires a good understanding of concepts like components, props, state, and JSX syntax. Highcharts, on the other hand, provides a simpler approach to creating charts and visualizations, making it easier to get started for developers with basic JavaScript knowledge.

In summary, Highcharts is a dedicated charting library with robust visualization capabilities, while React is a versatile JavaScript library primarily used for building user interfaces. They differ in rendering approach, data visualization focus, integration, architecture, community support, and learning curve.

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Advice on React, Highcharts

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

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.

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.
Statistics
GitHub Stars
240.3K
GitHub Stars
-
GitHub Forks
49.7K
GitHub Forks
-
Stacks
182.6K
Stacks
1.5K
Followers
147.0K
Followers
1.1K
Votes
4.1K
Votes
92
Pros & Cons
Pros
  • 837
    Components
  • 674
    Virtual dom
  • 579
    Performance
  • 509
    Simplicity
  • 442
    Composable
Cons
  • 41
    Requires discipline to keep architecture organized
  • 30
    No predefined way to structure your app
  • 29
    Need to be familiar with lots of third party packages
  • 13
    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

What are some alternatives to React, Highcharts?

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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