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Re:Ask HN: What's the best charting library for customer-fac... by snide on Monday April 29, 2024 @08:18AM (#40197344)
I've messed with a few. I really like Apache Echarts if you're looking for an all-in-one-can-do-anything solution with a good license. The downsides are that the docs can sometimes be a little obtuse. There are adapters for almost every front-end at this point.

Nivo is a much simpler system that is styled by default and works much easier with React. If you're not doing complicated charts, it's my goto for the "I just want a nice line/pie/bar chart".

Re:Ask HN: What's the best charting library for customer-fac... by sdesol on Monday April 29, 2024 @12:02PM (#40200080)
I've been using Echarts for quite a while now and I really like it. You can see how I am using them at https://devboard.gitsense.com/ollama

I also agree that the doc can be a little obtuse, but with examples + stackoverflow, you can figure things out.

Re:Ask HN: What's the best charting library for customer-fac... by whilenot-dev on Monday April 29, 2024 @11:44AM (#40199788)
Unfortunately some of the examples[0,1] seem to lag quite a bit on Firefox with larger screens.

[0]: https://echarts.apache.org/examples/en/editor.html?c=area-st...

[1]: https://echarts.apache.org/examples/en/editor.html?c=line-aq...

Re:Ask HN: What's the best charting library for customer-fac... by ggregoire on Monday April 29, 2024 @11:30AM (#40199607)
I just tried nivo in my last react project and eventually had to reinstall echarts-for-react since most of my charts have 2+ vertical axises with different scales and it's not supported in nivo (I read there is a hack with stacking multiple charts on top of each other, but in echarts it's just a 1 line option).

I've been using echarts for 5+ years and I've yet to encounter a chart I couldn't make exactly like I needed.

Re:Ask HN: What's the best charting library for customer-fac... by 037 on Monday April 29, 2024 @11:06AM (#40199280)
Re:Ask HN: What's the best charting library for customer-fac... by eatsyourtacos on Monday April 29, 2024 @10:42AM (#40198957)
We've been using ECharts for many years now and it's great. Built some of our own overlays to create the charting json.

Highcharts was something we originally were going to use but it's just too pricey.

Re:Ask HN: What's the best charting library for customer-fac... by AntonyGarand on Monday April 29, 2024 @10:25AM (#40198729)
+1 to echarts: While it can be more complex to start than the others, it remains fairly simple for the default graphs while providing enough flexibility to do pretty much anything.
Re:Ask HN: What's the best charting library for customer-fac... by rm_-rf_slash on Monday April 29, 2024 @11:28AM (#40199584)
Echarts isn’t hard to set up anymore now that GPT-4 takes care of the complexity.

Charts that used to take me days to set up and data-wrangle now only take minutes.

I suppose this applies to other libraries but I like echarts.

Re:Ask HN: What's the best charting library for customer-fac... by sdesol on Monday April 29, 2024 @01:12PM (#40201159)
Can you share some of your prompts that you have used?
Re:Ask HN: What's the best charting library for customer-fac... by rm_-rf_slash on Tuesday April 30, 2024 @11:07AM (#40211809)
‘Using echarts and provided DATA, demonstrate how to convert a table of rows such that the “value” is aggregated and shown on a bar chart as the sum of all “values” for each “timestamp”

DATA: {json array}’

Dumping your data into the context window tends to help specify the task and focus the AI on the data structures to use.

Re:Ask HN: What's the best charting library for customer-fac... by ok1984 on Monday April 29, 2024 @07:46AM (#40197127)
Did you consider Fusion Charts?
Re:Ask HN: What's the best charting library for customer-fac... by beingflo on Monday April 29, 2024 @08:58AM (#40197721)
I really enjoy using Observable Plot (https://observablehq.com/plot/). Made by the author of D3 but way simpler to use.
Re:Ask HN: What's the best charting library for customer-fac... by hbcondo714 on Monday April 29, 2024 @12:32PM (#40200566)
Me too, I enjoyed creating a data dashboard static site[1] with Observable Framework[2] + Plot for their line and bar graphs. I did run into an inconvenience when I used d3 components outside of this combo that requires you to "copy-paste the entire function"[3] rather than just importing it

[1] https://aba.amarkota.com

[2] https://observablehq.com/framework/

[3] https://observablehq.com/@d3/treemap-component

Re:Ask HN: What's the best charting library for customer-fac... by champdebloom on Monday April 29, 2024 @09:01AM (#40197760)
If you're using react, I really like Tremor: https://www.tremor.so/
Re:Ask HN: What's the best charting library for customer-fac... by anchen976 on Monday April 29, 2024 @09:38AM (#40198187)
We use highcharts to power most of our charting (we're an embedded analytics platform) and switched over from from chart.js

It's fairly powerful but also looks more polished out of the box. Some limitations on styling but that depends on your application/use case.

Re:Ask HN: What's the best charting library for customer-fac... by Cthulhu_ on Monday April 29, 2024 @11:26AM (#40199559)
Highcharts is like "ol' reliable" when it comes to chart libraries, I first used it over ten years ago for a customer-facing investment banking webapp and as far as I know it's still around.

Charting libraries are hard, Highcharts got a lot of things right back then and I don't think it's stopped since then.

Re:Ask HN: What's the best charting library for customer-fac... by akudha on Monday April 29, 2024 @12:25PM (#40200450)
I am also a big fan of Highcharts. It is not cheap though, especially for projects that aren't making any money yet
Re:Ask HN: What's the best charting library for customer-fac... by patwolf on Monday April 29, 2024 @11:59AM (#40200007)
Highcharts is nice. My only complaint is that the type declarations are absolutely huge--like 300k lines. It makes my IDE grind to a halt when using TypeScript. However, the typescript compiler is unfazed by it.
Re:Ask HN: What's the best charting library for customer-fac... by cableshaft on Wednesday May 01, 2024 @03:59PM (#40228575)
Highcharts is what some big financial clients I know use. It seems pretty solid and easy to learn and integrate from my experience with it.
[dead]
Re:Ask HN: What's the best charting library for customer-fac... by eatsyourtacos on Monday April 29, 2024 @10:43AM (#40198967)
Maybe I misread your post but why was there no mention of crypto and synergies?
Re:Ask HN: What's the best charting library for customer-fac... by ciscoriordan on Monday April 29, 2024 @10:48AM (#40199031)
AG Charts is in a simple/powerful sweet spot.
Re:Ask HN: What's the best charting library for customer-fac... by jareklupinski on Monday April 29, 2024 @10:48AM (#40199038)
Whichever one looks best with the rest of your dashboard :)

unless you specifically need to handle >100(0) data points, then only uplot or charts js will be performant (for free)

Re:Ask HN: What's the best charting library for customer-fac... by ushercakes on Monday April 29, 2024 @10:50AM (#40199067)
https://www.chartjs.org/

It's pretty easy to configure and understand. It's the 80/20 principal of charts, it is 80% of D3 functionality for 20% the effort.

Re:Ask HN: What's the best charting library for customer-fac... by mr-wendel on Monday April 29, 2024 @12:25PM (#40200455)
Ditto here. I thought I'd try Apex Charts on my most recent project and regret it:

- mobile support works, but is poorly done - very heavy library to load - RAM intensive; a few charts w/ lots (e.g. ~100) data points spirals out of control (e.g. memory spikes from 60 MB to 700 MB). On mobile this basically guarantees that the tab crashes. - UI interactions feel laggy and lack responsiveness (e.g. panning is pure guesswork)

I thought the SVG vs canvas focus would be nice, but not at these costs.

Re:Ask HN: What's the best charting library for customer-fac... by callmeed on Monday April 29, 2024 @11:47AM (#40199834)
+1 I use chartjs for the web version of fatgpt.ai. It easy to setup and you can get charts going very quickly.

If I needed more dense data viz (ex a datadog-like system) I'd probably go with something D3 based

Re:Ask HN: What's the best charting library for customer-fac... by saevarom on Monday April 29, 2024 @11:22AM (#40199509)
+1 for chart.js - use it for most charting needs and even created a Wagtail app[1] that uses Chart.js on the frontend to render charts based on user input.

[1] https://github.com/overcastsoftware/wagtailcharts

Re:Ask HN: What's the best charting library for customer-fac... by Rastonbury on Monday April 29, 2024 @11:22AM (#40199513)
I like chartsjs, better than what a $200bn company in Salesforce can come up with..
Re:Ask HN: What's the best charting library for customer-fac... by arbuge on Monday April 29, 2024 @01:19PM (#40201226)
+1. I use it in https://tagely.com and it works great.
Re:Ask HN: What's the best charting library for customer-fac... by PaywallBuster on Monday April 29, 2024 @10:51AM (#40199084)
what's the closest you can get to Grafana like looking?
Re:Ask HN: What's the best charting library for customer-fac... by kfor on Monday April 29, 2024 @10:52AM (#40199088)
I like Vega-Lite: https://vega.github.io/vega-lite/

It’s built by folks from the same lab as D3, but designed as “a higher-level visual specification language on top of D3” [https://vega.github.io/vega/about/vega-and-d3/]

My favorite way to prototype a dashboard is to use Streamlit to lay things out and serve it and then use Altair [https://altair-viz.github.io/] to generate the Vega-Lite plots in Python. Then if you need to move to something besides Python to productionize, you can produce the same Vega-Lite definitions using the framework of your choice.

Re:Ask HN: What's the best charting library for customer-fac... by acomjean on Monday April 29, 2024 @12:27PM (#40200475)
We like Vega lite. I always find it gets me 95% of the way there very easily. It’s the best we’ve used. You can download as svgs too.

We use it for our online graphing in its native JavaScript form.

Re:Ask HN: What's the best charting library for customer-fac... by pplonski86 on Monday April 29, 2024 @12:37PM (#40200661)
I build dashboards in Jupyter Lab. My plotting libraries are Altair, matplotlib, seaborn, Plotly - all work well in notebook.

My favorite is Altair. It provides interactivity for charts, so you can move/zoom your plots and have tooltips. It is much lighter than Plotly after saving the notebook to ipynb file. Altair charts looks much better than in matplotlib. One drawback, that exporting to PDF doesn't work. To serve notebook as dashboard with code hidden, I use Mercury framework, you can check example https://runmercury.com/tutorials/vega-altair-dashboard/

disclaimer: I'm author of Mercury framework https://github.com/mljar/mercury

Re:Ask HN: What's the best charting library for customer-fac... by marban on Monday April 29, 2024 @10:56AM (#40199140)
Re:Ask HN: What's the best charting library for customer-fac... by joewils on Monday April 29, 2024 @10:58AM (#40199174)
If print friendly reports are a requirement, I'd go with QuickChart (https://quickchart.io.)

Static charts similar to chart.js, but without all the javascript. I've found static charts are much easier to work with once print CSS layout becomes a requirement.

Re:Ask HN: What's the best charting library for customer-fac... by sprash on Monday April 29, 2024 @11:09AM (#40199325)
Not powerful but extremely simple, especially if you want to avoid JavaScript at all cost:

https://chartscss.org

Re:Ask HN: What's the best charting library for customer-fac... by justincarter on Monday April 29, 2024 @11:10AM (#40199338)
I have used d3 for a few years now and with ChatGPT I find it at least 50% easier to set it up and troubleshoot issues.
Re:Ask HN: What's the best charting library for customer-fac... by url00 on Monday April 29, 2024 @11:13AM (#40199373)
Honestly, ChatGPT + D3 has been great for me. But YMMV of course.
Re:Ask HN: What's the best charting library for customer-fac... by _boffin_ on Monday April 29, 2024 @11:16AM (#40199412)
There are a lot of fantastic libraries out there that can work. Best? How do you define that?
Re:Ask HN: What's the best charting library for customer-fac... by gear54rus on Monday April 29, 2024 @11:20AM (#40199483)
c3 is another built-on-top-of-d3 thingie: https://c3js.org/examples.html
Re:Ask HN: What's the best charting library for customer-fac... by siamese_puff on Monday April 29, 2024 @11:21AM (#40199500)
As someone who has recently been deep diving D3 for fun, I will give you my opinion.

D3 is the king of data visualization written by Mike Bostock, a creative comp sci dude with incredible data viz and programming skills (love ya Mike)

The initial learning curve is kinda steep, but in reality it’s actually a really logical setup, you just need to build a few mental models. Without a doubt, I would pick D3. Top charting libs use D3 under the hood. It’s so god damn flexible you can build whatever you want.

Study d3indepth.com for a couple weeks, write a lot of code and watch some YouTube videos. The books are usually meh on this subject and outdated. Mike started Observable to make this passion of his profitable. It’s like Jupiter notebooks for visualizations using D3.

I’ve been wanting to write more and use visualizations to strengthen my writing and I’m picking a mix of D3 and standard JS/HTML to do it. Very satisfying

Re:Ask HN: What's the best charting library for customer-fac... by sokoloff on Monday April 29, 2024 @11:38AM (#40199714)
Came to say something similar. D3 starts out feeling like “magic” (in a bad way) until you wrap your head around the join/enter/update/exit model and how the various parts fit together.

Once you grasp it, it starts feeling like magic in the very good sense of that. I think it’s worth doing 3-5 representative “here’s what I want; how do I do it in D3?” exercises before concluding that D3 is too complex.

Re:Ask HN: What's the best charting library for customer-fac... by siamese_puff on Monday April 29, 2024 @11:53AM (#40199927)
Exactly. I spent like a week or two building bar charts and line charts in various ways to learn the basics, which helps. Some stuff I see, like on Mikes blog is seemingly magic
Re:Ask HN: What's the best charting library for customer-fac... by gwbas1c on Monday April 29, 2024 @12:33PM (#40200587)
I 2nd D3, especially if you have a lot of datapoints.

I've kicked off a rewrite of an old Angular application that uses D3 in Blazor. I did a rather detailed tour of native Blazor charting libraries, and they all choked when given hundreds of datapoints.

I ended to deciding to wrap D3 for Blazor when we're ready to update that part.

Re:Ask HN: What's the best charting library for customer-fac... by tharmas on Monday April 29, 2024 @12:58PM (#40200959)
Many thanks for that link! Agree with all your points. D3.js is indeed an excellent library and worth learning.
Re:Ask HN: What's the best charting library for customer-fac... by nickzelei on Monday April 29, 2024 @11:53AM (#40199931)
Chartjs looks great, but I've never used it so can't recommend personally. I've used https://recharts.org a lot with success.
Re:Ask HN: What's the best charting library for customer-fac... by klysm on Monday April 29, 2024 @12:31PM (#40200560)
ECharts is pretty good
Re:Ask HN: What's the best charting library for customer-fac... by itomato on Monday April 29, 2024 @12:44PM (#40200742)
Shout out to rrdtool if your criteria for best includes maturity
Re:Ask HN: What's the best charting library for customer-fac... by pzo on Monday April 29, 2024 @12:47PM (#40200774)
Another alternative - I haven't tried this but bookmarked that one:

https://nivo.rocks (https://github.com/plouc/nivo)

Re:Ask HN: What's the best charting library for customer-fac... by devolymp on Monday April 29, 2024 @12:49PM (#40200820)
We used Recharts to build our own opinionated charts at tremor.so
Re:Ask HN: What's the best charting library for customer-fac... by tomjakubowski on Monday April 29, 2024 @01:26PM (#40201312)
Try Perspective, especially if you want users to be able to interact with the visualizations and update them - including re-aggregating the data https://perspective.finos.org/
Re:Ask HN: What's the best charting library for customer-fac... by hughess on Monday April 29, 2024 @01:29PM (#40201356)
We use echarts at https://evidence.dev and have been quite happy with it. We do a lot of embedded analytics and it's worked well for us.
Re:Ask HN: What's the best charting library for customer-fac... by tommiegannert on Monday April 29, 2024 @02:43PM (#40202255)
Plotly is based on D3. Has both open-source version and paid option.

https://plotly.com/javascript/

Re:Ask HN: What's the best charting library for customer-fac... by TN1ck on Monday April 29, 2024 @06:19PM (#40204799)
If you need really custom charts and use react, I can recommend Visx. It’s a small wrapper around d3, that doesn’t really try to create their own abstractions, but mostly uses d3 conventions.

We use them for all our charting needs (quite a bit!) at re-cap.com.

Re:Ask HN: What's the best charting library for customer-fac... by xbpx on Monday April 29, 2024 @06:37PM (#40204953)
Plotly offers more power and flexibility than chart.js and provides a much simpler API than D3 (it has D3 and webgl renderers). The ecosystem is broad and includes React, Angular and other wrappers and language-interfaces for Python, Rust, Go, Scala and many others (incl Common Lisp).

If you start plotting a lot of data it can grow with you since it supports typed arrays and webgl rendering without undue boilerplate.

Disclaimer... I work for Plotly

Re:Ask HN: What's the best charting library for customer-fac... by wismwasm on Tuesday April 30, 2024 @06:39AM (#40209440)
I like Plotly’s interactivity, but the Python API would be so much better if it was typed. I need to google which attributes to change to get anything done all the time. Copilot helps a bit but also constantly hallucinates plausible but not implemented plotly settings.

I also failed when trying to create a nice violin plot as implemented with matplotlib in the Shap library.

That said I tried using other charting libraries but Plotly’s interactivity is a killer feature others don’t offer in the same way.

Re:Ask HN: What's the best charting library for customer-fac... by slake on Monday April 29, 2024 @11:23PM (#40206914)
Apache Echarts. You run into constraints with most others after a point.
Re:Ask HN: What's the best charting library for customer-fac... by farseer on Tuesday April 30, 2024 @08:08AM (#40210123)
If you have millions of data points and require real time performance then go for a paid solution like SciChart: https://www.scichart.com/
Re:Ask HN: What's the best charting library for customer-fac... by ilamparithi on Tuesday April 30, 2024 @01:06PM (#40213326)
I used Apex Charts recently with VueJS. Happy with the exhaustive configuration options available for each charts. It worked well for my use case.
Re:Ask HN: What's the best charting library for customer-fac... by MattSWilliamson on Thursday May 02, 2024 @01:39AM (#40233036)
I'd recommend Vizzly: https://www.vizzly.co.

It's a low-code solution for customer-facing analytics but is super flexible and extensible with code. Embedding is available in React or Vanilla JS (no iFrames). You can build dashboards programmatically or with the no-code editor.

The backend query engine is also pretty powerful; performant and copes well with complex customer data structures.

Re:Ask HN: What's the best charting library for customer-fac... by pob944 on Thursday May 02, 2024 @04:43PM (#40241160)