recharts vs chart.js vs react-chartjs-2 vs react-charts
Charting Libraries for React Comparison
1 Year
rechartschart.jsreact-chartjs-2react-chartsSimilar Packages:
What's Charting Libraries for React?

Charting libraries are essential tools for visualizing data in web applications. They provide developers with the ability to create interactive and responsive charts, graphs, and visual representations of data, enhancing user engagement and understanding. These libraries often come with a variety of chart types, customization options, and integration capabilities, making them versatile for different use cases. Choosing the right charting library can significantly impact the performance, maintainability, and user experience of a web application.

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recharts7,446,21925,2244.64 MB456a month agoMIT
chart.js4,742,87265,9464.96 MB480a month agoMIT
react-chartjs-21,813,2576,79055.9 kB1035 months agoMIT
react-charts24,7663,085-735 years agoMIT
Feature Comparison: recharts vs chart.js vs react-chartjs-2 vs react-charts

Integration with React

  • recharts:

    Recharts is also built for React, offering a declarative API that allows you to create charts using React components, making it intuitive and easy to integrate.

  • chart.js:

    Chart.js is a standalone library that can be integrated into any JavaScript project, including React, but requires additional setup for state management and lifecycle methods.

  • react-chartjs-2:

    This package is specifically designed for React, allowing you to use Chart.js charts as React components, which simplifies integration and state management.

  • react-charts:

    React-charts is built for React from the ground up, providing a highly customizable and flexible API that fits well into the React ecosystem, making it easy to manage state and lifecycle events.

Customization Options

  • recharts:

    Recharts provides a rich set of customization options through its composable components, allowing you to easily modify styles, tooltips, and interactions, making it highly adaptable.

  • chart.js:

    Chart.js provides extensive customization options, allowing you to modify chart types, colors, labels, and tooltips. However, it may require more manual configuration compared to React-specific libraries.

  • react-chartjs-2:

    Since it wraps Chart.js, react-chartjs-2 inherits its customization capabilities, allowing for detailed control over chart appearance and behavior while leveraging React's component model.

  • react-charts:

    React-charts offers a high degree of customization, enabling you to create unique visualizations tailored to your application's needs. It supports custom rendering and styling for various chart elements.

Performance

  • recharts:

    Recharts is built for performance, utilizing React's virtual DOM to minimize re-renders and ensure smooth interactions, even with complex charts.

  • chart.js:

    Chart.js is optimized for performance, but as the complexity of charts increases, performance may degrade if not managed properly, especially with large datasets.

  • react-chartjs-2:

    Performance is generally good, but since it relies on Chart.js, it may face similar performance issues with complex charts or large datasets if not optimized.

  • react-charts:

    React-charts is designed with performance in mind, focusing on rendering efficiency and responsiveness, making it suitable for applications with dynamic data.

Learning Curve

  • recharts:

    Recharts is designed to be intuitive for React developers, with a declarative approach that simplifies the process of creating and customizing charts.

  • chart.js:

    Chart.js has a moderate learning curve, especially for developers unfamiliar with its API. However, once learned, it is straightforward to use for creating basic charts.

  • react-chartjs-2:

    The learning curve is relatively low for those already familiar with React, as it abstracts much of the complexity of Chart.js into React components.

  • react-charts:

    React-charts has a gentle learning curve, especially for React developers, as it emphasizes a simple API and composable components, making it easy to get started.

Community and Support

  • recharts:

    Recharts has a strong community and good documentation, making it easy to find support and examples for common use cases.

  • chart.js:

    Chart.js has a large community and extensive documentation, providing ample resources for troubleshooting and learning.

  • react-chartjs-2:

    Being a wrapper around Chart.js, it benefits from the same community support, though it may have fewer dedicated resources compared to Chart.js itself.

  • react-charts:

    React-charts has a growing community and decent documentation, but it may not be as extensive as the more established libraries.

How to Choose: recharts vs chart.js vs react-chartjs-2 vs react-charts
  • recharts:

    Recharts is the best choice if you prefer a declarative approach to building charts in React. It is built specifically for React and offers a set of composable components that make it easy to create complex charts while ensuring good performance and responsiveness.

  • chart.js:

    Choose Chart.js if you need a lightweight, standalone charting library that can be easily integrated into any JavaScript project. It offers a wide range of chart types and is highly customizable, making it suitable for simple to moderately complex visualizations.

  • react-chartjs-2:

    Opt for react-chartjs-2 if you are working within a React environment and want to leverage the power of Chart.js with React's component-based architecture. This package provides a seamless way to integrate Chart.js charts as React components, simplifying state management and lifecycle handling.

  • react-charts:

    Select react-charts for a more flexible and customizable charting solution that focuses on performance and responsiveness. It is built on top of React and offers a simple API for creating complex visualizations while maintaining a lightweight footprint, making it ideal for applications with dynamic data.

README for recharts

Recharts

storybook Build Status Coverage Status npm version npm downloads MIT License

Introduction

Recharts is a Redefined chart library built with React and D3.

The main purpose of this library is to help you to write charts in React applications without any pain. Main principles of Recharts are:

  1. Simply deploy with React components.
  2. Native SVG support, lightweight depending only on some D3 submodules.
  3. Declarative components, components of charts are purely presentational.

Documentation at recharts.org and our storybook (WIP)

Please see the wiki for FAQ.

All development is done on the master branch. The current latest release and storybook documentation reflects what is on the release branch.

Examples

<LineChart width={400} height={400} data={data} margin={{ top: 5, right: 20, left: 10, bottom: 5 }}>
  <XAxis dataKey="name" />
  <Tooltip />
  <CartesianGrid stroke="#f5f5f5" />
  <Line type="monotone" dataKey="uv" stroke="#ff7300" yAxisId={0} />
  <Line type="monotone" dataKey="pv" stroke="#387908" yAxisId={1} />
</LineChart>

All the components of Recharts are clearly separated. The lineChart is composed of x axis, tooltip, grid, and line items, and each of them is an independent React Component. The clear separation and composition of components is one of the principle Recharts follows.

Installation

npm

NPM is the easiest and fastest way to get started using Recharts. It is also the recommended installation method when building single-page applications (SPAs). It pairs nicely with a CommonJS module bundler such as Webpack.

# latest stable
$ npm install recharts

umd

The UMD build is also available on unpkg.com:

<script src="https://unpkg.com/react/umd/react.production.min.js"></script>
<script src="https://unpkg.com/react-dom/umd/react-dom.production.min.js"></script>
<script src="https://unpkg.com/recharts/umd/Recharts.min.js"></script>

Then you can find the library on window.Recharts.

dev build

$ git clone https://github.com/recharts/recharts.git
$ cd recharts
$ npm install
$ npm run build

Demo

To examine the demos in your local build, execute:

$ npm run[-script] demo

and then browse to http://localhost:3000.

Storybook

We are in the process of unifying documentation and examples in storybook. To run it locally, execute

$ npm run[-script] storybook

and then browse to http://localhost:6006.

Releases

Releases are automated via GH Actions - when a new release is created in GH, CI will trigger that:

  1. Runs a build
  2. Runs tests
  3. Runs npm publish

Version increments and tagging are not automated at this time.

Release testing

Until we can automate more, it should be preferred to test as close to the results of npm publish as we possibly can. This ensures we don't publish unintended breaking changes. One way to do that is using yalc - npm i -g yalc.

  1. Make your changes in recharts
  2. yalc publish in recharts
  3. yalc add recharts in your test package (ex: in a vite or webpack reach app with recharts installed, imported, and your recent changes used)
  4. npm install
  5. Test a local run, a build, etc.

Module Formats

  • babel-plugin-recharts A simple transform to cherry-pick Recharts modules so you don’t have to. Note: this plugin is out of date and may not work with 2.x

Thanks

Chromatic

Thanks to Chromatic for providing the visual testing platform that helps us review UI changes and catch visual regressions.

License

MIT

Copyright (c) 2015-2023 Recharts Group.