It's not new, I remember using the .plot function 2 or 3 year ago. Seaborn is much better anyway though, so don't bother switching.

And the pandas plots are ugly

IIRC, if you import seaborn, then pandas plots will use seaborn styling. I don't think seaborn is a standalone plotting library - it's merely provides styling. So you can have your cake and eat it too.

Seaborn adds new plotting functions, not merely a new style, though I'm not sure that qualifies it to be called standalone. Certainly Seaborn has matplotlib as a dependency.

You can use plt.style.use("seaborn") [0] to just use the style. Style sheets reference [1]

[0] https://matplotlib.org/tutorials/introductory/customizing.ht...

[1] https://matplotlib.org/gallery/style_sheets/style_sheets_ref...

It is wrong to say Seaborn only provides styling. There are many types of plots available in Seaborn which are Not available in Matplotlib. It might not be extensive, but what it does, it does better than Matplotlib.

This capability is at least a few years old which is when I first started using pandas. I believe it uses matplotlib on the backend for the plotting by default, and works pretty seamlessly with seaborn too.

It's a matplotlib wrapper.

I've been using pandas since 2012 and it had decent plotting capabilities back then.