vega-lite VS ggplot2

Compare vega-lite vs ggplot2 and see what are their differences.

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vega-lite ggplot2
15 62
4,463 6,316
1.5% 1.2%
9.2 9.4
5 days ago 8 days ago
TypeScript R
BSD 3-clause "New" or "Revised" License GNU General Public License v3.0 or later
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.

vega-lite

Posts with mentions or reviews of vega-lite. 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-Lite – A Grammar of Interactive Graphics
    1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 11 Apr 2024
    1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 26 Jul 2023
  • Vega-Altair: Declarative Visualization in Python
    9 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 25 Feb 2024
    Box zoom would need to be added to Vega-Lite first, and there has been some discussion around it in https://github.com/vega/vega-lite/issues/4742. Bottom line is that there's nothing blocking its implementation, someone just needs to do the work in Vega-Lite. And once released in Vega-Lite, Altair would pick it up automatically with how we generate the Altair API from the Vega-Lite schema.
  • Gnuplotlib: Non-Painful Plotting for NumPy
    5 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 31 Jan 2024
    I also have difficulties with Gnuplot and Matplotlib. I like Vega that allows me to create visualisations in a declarative way. If I really need something special I go with d3.js, which had a really steep learning curve but with ChatGPT it should have become easier for beginners.

    [1] https://vega.github.io/vega-lite/

  • Elixir Livebook is a secret weapon for documentation
    12 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 6 Aug 2023
    To ensure you do not miss this: LiveBook comes with a Vega Lite integration (https://livebook.dev/integrations -> https://livebook.dev/integrations/vega-lite/), which means you get access to a lot of visualisations out of the box, should you need that (https://vega.github.io/vega-lite/).

    In the same "standing on giant's shoulders" stance, you can use Explorer (see example LiveBook at https://github.com/elixir-explorer/explorer/blob/main/notebo...), which leverages Polars (https://www.pola.rs), a very fast DataFrame library and now a company (https://www.pola.rs/posts/company-announcement/) with 4M$ seed.

  • Observable Plot: The JavaScript library for exploratory data visualization
    17 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 26 Apr 2023
    Nice, would be nice to have it integrated in GitHub markdown.

    Looks similar to Vega or Vega-lite(https://vega.github.io/vega-lite/). Definitely as rich as D3.js but gets the job done for simple visualisations.

  • [AskJS] Javascript statistics library with period selection
    1 project | /r/javascript | 3 Mar 2023
    Vega-lite can do this https://vega.github.io/vega-lite/
  • 2022 FIFA World Cup finishing position probability per team [OC]
    3 projects | /r/dataisbeautiful | 20 Nov 2022
    The underlying data is from an online betting site. Data analysis was done in Python and I used Vega/Altair for the visualisation.
  • Plotting
    5 projects | /r/lisp | 7 Nov 2022
    I have a bunch of data that I want to plot. I'm using lisp-stat, which is pretty good, for data frames and analysis. However, lisp-stat uses vega-lite for plotting and to put it mildly, vega-lite is fucking awful.
  • Chartist: Simple Responsive Charts in SVG
    5 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 30 Oct 2022
    I wish the author all the best in developing his library; at the moment it seems quite incomplete, so if you want SVG charts today, I recommend Observable Plot[1] or Vega-Lite[2]

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

    [2]: https://vega.github.io/vega-lite/

ggplot2

Posts with mentions or reviews of ggplot2. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2024-01-02.

What are some alternatives?

When comparing vega-lite and ggplot2 you can also consider the following projects:

graphic-walker - An open source alternative to Tableau. Embeddable visual analytic

Altair - Declarative statistical visualization library for Python

vega-tooltip - Tooltip Plugin for Vega-Lite

tmap - R package for thematic maps

py4cl2 - Call python from Common Lisp

vega - A visualization grammar.

plot - A vega-lite DSL for Common Lisp

dplyr - dplyr: A grammar of data manipulation

lightning - High performance, interactive statistical graphics engine for the web.

worldfootballR - A wrapper for extracting world football (soccer) data from FBref, Transfermark, Understat and fotmob

plot - A node library to display charts in popup windows and save them as pngs. Supports observablehq/plot, vega-lite and plotly out of the box.

glue - Glue strings to data in R. Small, fast, dependency free interpreted string literals.