In simple English
This library lets you draw charts on web pages. You feed it numbers and settings, and it builds interactive graphs. It handles lines, bars, maps, and 3D shapes. You do not pay anything to use it. It is free under an MIT licence.
What it is
Plotly.js is a standalone JavaScript data visualization library for the web. It provides dozens of chart types and powers the plotting engines used in other programming languages.
What it is good for
Solo builders who need to display complex data, scientific graphs, or financial charts in a web browser without writing a drawing engine from scratch.
- Draws dozens of chart types out of the box, including maps and 3D graphs.
- Free to use under the MIT licence with active maintenance.
- Can be loaded directly from a content delivery network via a simple script tag.
- The full download bundle is very large and can slow down page loading times.
- Requires writing JavaScript or JSON configuration objects for every chart detail.
- Documentation is split across multiple external websites and repositories.
Writing custom drawing code with HTML canvas or SVG elements by hand.
React or plain HTML pages served with Node.js.
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npm i --save plotly.js-dist-min