Top 5 JavaScript Libraries for Creating Beautiful Charts for Developer

There are now thousands of charting libraries floating around out there on the JavaScript sea. When it comes to charting, it’s very easy for us to be enthralled by a beautiful interface. But, it is to our great detriment to jump into bed with a charting library without knowing the real substance behind it.

A nice interface and copy / paste code are all well and good if we need something generic to our needs, but realistically, most of the time we need something tailored to our use case. And more than that — we need a reliable charting library that we can build upon.

In this article we will introduce you to the top 5 JavaScript charting libraries available today to help you make informed decisions when working on a project for you.

1. Chart.js

ChartJS provides beautiful flat designs for charts. It uses the HTML5 Canvas element for rendering and supports all modern browsers (IE11+).

ChartJS charts are responsive by default. They work well on mobile and tablets. There are 8 different types of charts out of the box (Line, Bar, Radar, Doughnut and Pie, Polar Area, Bubble, Scatter, Area), plus the ability to mix them. All charts are animated and customizable.

2. HighCharts

HighCharts a modern charting library based on SVG technology. It doesn’t require any plugin. Apparently, HighCharts is used by 70% of the largest companies in the world. Particularly with this library, you can become a fan of the dynamic charts, which enable the end user to tangibly interact with the data. The integration with all of the major web frameworks is very simple.

In all of its simplicity, Highcharts is also very much compatible with old browsers, so you can pick it if you don’t need to represent data using advanced charting styles.

3. D3.js

When we think of charting today, D3.js is the first name that comes up. Being an open source project, D3.js definitely brings many powerful features that were missing in most of the existing libraries. Features like dynamic properties, Enter and Exit, powerful transitions, and syntax familiarity with jQuery make it one the best JavaScript libraries for charting. Charts in D3.js are rendered via HTML, SVG and CSS.

Unlike many other JavaScript libraries, D3.js doesn’t ship with any pre-built charts out of the box. However, you can look at the list of graphs built with D3.js to get an overview. As you can see, D3.js supports a vast variety of chart types.

A drawback for beginners could be its steep learning curve, but there are many tutorials and resources to get you started.

D3.js doesn’t work well with older browsers like IE8. But you can always use plugins like aight plugin for cross-browser compatibility.

4. Chartist

Chartist is thoroughly modern, SVG based library. It was built upon the idea that other libraries were simply not giving enough customisation options. The biggest feature, arguably, is the SVG animations in the charts produced with this library.

If a modern browser is used, one can implement CSS3 animations on SVG attributes that turn standard charts into something much more visually pleasing. One can also implement much more extensive animations with SMIL.

This library looks aren’t just skin deep. It has a solid technology base and is very easy to implement. Within minutes, one can have incredibly impressive, expressive charts that interact easily with any backend data source. Chartist is notably easy to configure, as well as being easy to customize with Sass. It, however, doesn’t support older browsers like its “sister” Chart.js does.

5. ZingChart

ZingChart offers a flexible, interactive, fast, scalable and modern product for creating charts quickly. Their product is used by companies like Apple, Microsoft, Adobe, Boeing and Cisco, and uses Ajax, JSON, HTML5 to deliver great-looking charts quickly.

ZingChart offers more than 35 responsive chart types and modules, which can also be showing data in real-time. They can be styled and themed by CSS and can render big data fast.

You can check out their rich set of examples.

A branded version, with all charts, is available to try for free, but for watermark-free output you need to buy one of ZingChart’s paid licenses according to your business size.

With charting being something we all need to implement so often now, it’s no great surprise that there are many open source charting libraries available for us to choose from. The libraries I mentioned above are some of the most popular, and are all libraries I have had a chance to either implement in a production environment or to experiment with first-hand.

Thanks for reading !

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