Line charts are bread and butter of visualization. Here we test out libraries and methods for making them.
Examples can be seen here
- Vega - easy to get started, almost fully customizable.
- Vega-lite - very easy to generate basic charts, some limitations and difficulties when adding interactions such as hovering data points.
- Plotly and Plotly-json - simple usage, lots of features, very fast. One drawback is that JSON language is not very well documented, template oriented (not grammar of graphics) and not a standard like vega
- Chart.js - easy to get started but some limitations when working with CSV files. When added about 5k data entries it became significantly slow.
- Bokeh - very easy implementation, seems be more difficult to use on website than JS libraries.
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Vega/Vega-lite
- Elegance: 4.5 (but takes a bit of work e.g. hovers have to be explicitly added)
- Ease of implementation: 4
- Performance: 5
- Features: 3.5 (vega-embed supports download etc but is going away. zoom is quite complex etc)
- Extensibility: 5 (very easy to change to other chart types, lots of support)
- Community:
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Plotly
- Elegance: 4.5
- Ease of implementation: 5
- Performance: 5
- Features: 5 (download, zoom etc are all built in)
- Extensibility: 4 (lots of other chart types)
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Chart.js
- Elegance: 4
- Ease of implementation: 5
- Performance: 3
- Features: 3.5
- Extensibility: