plot VS d3

Compare plot vs d3 and see what are their differences.

plot

A concise API for exploratory data visualization implementing a layered grammar of graphics (by observablehq)

d3

Bring data to life with SVG, Canvas and HTML. :bar_chart::chart_with_upwards_trend::tada: (by d3)
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plot d3
38 277
3,862 107,634
3.3% 0.3%
9.1 8.0
6 days ago 19 days ago
HTML Shell
ISC License ISC License
The number of mentions indicates the total number of mentions that we've tracked plus the number of user suggested alternatives.
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.

plot

Posts with mentions or reviews of plot. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2024-02-25.
  • Vega-Altair: Declarative Visualization in Python
    9 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 25 Feb 2024
    I love Vega(-lite) / Altair, the grammar of graphics plotting system is really great to build any kind of chart even when it wasn't thought through by the authors of the library. There are other wrappers for languages that lack viz libraries, such as Elixir / Livebook [0]

    However, when I used it a couples years back it struggled with large vizs, I think due to Vega(-lite)'s way of embedding the data in the viz artifact.

    Also, interactive is nice but often I just need a quick static plot, and matplotlib is more convenient for this, you can easily see the png in any environment etc.

    These days I'm eager to see an Observable Plot [1] wrapper for Python !

    [0] https://github.com/livebook-dev/vega_lite

    [1] https://github.com/observablehq/plot

  • Observable 2.0, a static site generator for data apps
    17 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 15 Feb 2024
    Good questions.

    1. It’s just JavaScript so you can fetch stuff dynamically too (see https://observablehq.com/framework/lib/duckdb). But yeah, only client-side. (Though see https://github.com/observablehq/framework/issues/234.)

    2. Sure, it’s all open source, I bet you could make that work. Or `yarn deploy` to Observable and configure sharing there (though it wouldn’t let you charge others).

    3. Yup. Which is part of the appeal of model of running data loaders at build time: you can query some private data and viewers would only be able to see the final result set. (The lack of something like this has always been a huge problem for Observable notebooks. You’d make some great query-driven charts and then couldn’t make it public without some awkward manual dance of downloading and re-uploading a file to a fork of the notebook.)

    4. I wish I knew! It’s being tracked here https://github.com/observablehq/plot/issues/1711. Lately there’s been a lot more work on Framework naturally but now that that’s out…

    5. Another good question. We’re definitely interested in tailoring it more to this sort of use case but lots is TBD!

  • Using Deno with Jupyter Notebook to build a data dashboard
    5 projects | dev.to | 17 Jan 2024
    Observable Plot: A library built on top of D3.js used to visualize data and iterate more quickly on different plot chart
  • What website frameworks are used to build these websites?
    3 projects | /r/webdev | 9 Dec 2023
    https://observablehq.com/
  • Yandex open sourced it's BI tool DataLens
    4 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 26 Sep 2023
    Observable Plot [0] is also nice. AFAIU it's the same library powering the visualizations within Observable itself.

    [0] https://observablehq.com/plot/

  • Best React charting libraries for data visualizations
    1 project | /r/react | 27 May 2023
    I liked observablehq plot library: https://github.com/observablehq/plot
  • Bank Failures Visualized
    1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 3 May 2023
  • Observable Plot: A JavaScript library for exploratory data visualization
    1 project | /r/patient_hackernews | 28 Apr 2023
    1 project | /r/hackernews | 28 Apr 2023
  • Observable Plot: The JavaScript library for exploratory data visualization
    1 project | /r/hypeurls | 27 Apr 2023

d3

Posts with mentions or reviews of d3. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2024-03-25.
  • A visual guide to Vision Transformer – A scroll story
    1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 16 Apr 2024
    Yes this was done with a combination of GSAP Scrolltrigger https://gsap.com/docs/v3/Plugins/ScrollTrigger/ and https://d3js.org/
  • Ask HN: Tips to get started on my own server
    19 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 25 Mar 2024
  • Full Stack Web Development Concept map
    11 projects | dev.to | 23 Mar 2024
    d3 - very power visualization library enabling dynamic visualizations. docs
  • Observable 2.0, a static site generator for data apps
    17 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 15 Feb 2024
    Yep, Evidence is doing good work. We were most directly inspired by VitePress; we spent months rewriting both D3’s docs (https://d3js.org) and Observable Plot’s docs (https://observablehq.com/plot) in VitePress, and absolutely loved the experience. But we wanted a tool focused on data apps, dashboards, reports — observability and business intelligence use cases rather than documentation. Compared to Evidence, I’d say we’re trying to target data app developers more than data analysts; we offer a lot of power and expressiveness, and emphasize custom visualizations and interaction (leaning on Observable Plot or D3), as well as polyglot programming with data loaders written in any language (Python, R, not just SQL).
  • Using Deno with Jupyter Notebook to build a data dashboard
    5 projects | dev.to | 17 Jan 2024
    D3.js: A robust library to visualize your data and create interactive data-driven visualizations.
  • What is the technology stack used to create these live charts?
    2 projects | /r/learnprogramming | 10 Dec 2023
    They are images so it could be any number of things, datawrapper, charts.js, d3.js to name a few options.
  • Animated map showing frequency and location of births around the world [OC]
    1 project | /r/dataisbeautiful | 5 Dec 2023
    I made this interactive visualization that attempts to show the real-time frequency and location of births around the world. A country’s annual births (i.e. the country’s population times its birthrate) were distributed across all of the populated locations in each country, weighted by the population distribution (i.e. more populated areas got a greater fraction of the births). Data Sources and Tools Population and birthrate data for 2023 was obtained from Wikipedia (Population and birth rates). Population distribution across the globe was obtained from Socioeconomic Data and Applications Center (sedac) at Columbia University. Data is processed and visualized at a 1 degree x 1 degree resolution, each of which has a different probability of a birth occurring in a specific time period. D3.js was used to create the map elements and html, css and javascript were used to create the user interface.
  • How do you implement library types?
    2 projects | /r/typescript | 3 Dec 2023
    When I go to the homepage of types/d3 the only hint for any kind of documentation is what seems to be the main github page of d3. It's highly possible I'm missing something here, so sorry if I am but I can't find any documentation of how you are supposed to type these library objects.
  • The top 11 React chart libraries for data visualization
    10 projects | dev.to | 5 Oct 2023
    Website: D3.js official site
  • Frontend development roadmap
    9 projects | /r/learnprogramming | 2 Oct 2023
    D3js

What are some alternatives?

When comparing plot and d3 you can also consider the following projects:

plot-react - React wrapper for @observablehq/plot

echarts - Apache ECharts is a powerful, interactive charting and data visualization library for browser

blazor-samples - Explore and learn Syncfusion Blazor components using large collection of demos, example applications and tutorial samples

GoJS, a JavaScript Library for HTML Diagrams - JavaScript diagramming library for interactive flowcharts, org charts, design tools, planning tools, visual languages.

vis

go-echarts - 🎨 The adorable charts library for Golang

d4 - A friendly reusable charts DSL for D3

gonum - Gonum is a set of numeric libraries for the Go programming language. It contains libraries for matrices, statistics, optimization, and more

svg.js - The lightweight library for manipulating and animating SVG

cli-d3 - Generate d3 plots from the command-line.

sigma.js - A JavaScript library aimed at visualizing graphs of thousands of nodes and edges