Useful open-source data visualization libraries for your React application.
Charts are like wheelchairs for our feeble minds. If you want to make a data-informed decision, you better get the right help 🙂
“There is magic in graphs. The profile of a curve reveals in a flash a whole situation — the life history of an epidemic, a panic, or an era of prosperity. The curve informs the mind, awakens the imagination, convinces.
[…] Words have wings, but graphs interpret. Graphs are pure quantity, stripped of verbal sham, reduced to dimension, vivid, unescapable.”
— Willard C. Brinton, 1939
Using the right type of chart is one decision to make when presenting data but as React developers, we have our own set of concerns, mainly, choosing the right chart component library.
So, what are my criteria for a good chart library?
It should be highly customizable
It should have an easy API and a clear and comprehensible documentation
It should present a good UI/UX
It should be widely adopted and tested (why be the guinea pig?)
One important tip to keep in mind — components are all about reusability and standardization — that’s a good way to guarantee a consistent UI and easy maintenance. Use platforms like Bit to share your components, reuse them across apps, and let everyone collaborate together to build your products with atomic components. To avoid repeated copy-pasting, try making your own customized React chart library with Bit for your future-self and others 😉
So, without further ado, here is my list of top 5 React chart libraries:
1. Rechart
Rechart (built with D3.js) is all about modularity and simplicity. The grid, the tooltip, the line items, etc. are all reusable React components; that makes it much easier to customize charts and even reuse your own customized “sub-chart” components in other chart-compositions.
Recharts
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:
- Simply deploy with React components.
- Native SVG support, lightweight depending only on some D3 submodules.
- 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…2. Victory
By offering a highly opinionated component ecosystem with fully overridable styling and behavior, Victory keeps the right balance between ease-of-use and high customizability.
Victory is also a good choice for those of us who are looking for a cross-platform solution. It has an almost identical API for both ReactJS and React Native — an important thing to keep in mind.
FormidableLabs
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victory
A collection of composable React components for building interactive data visualizations
an ecosystem of composable React components for building interactive data visualizations
Victory
Contents
- See the docs and examples on the website: https://commerce.nearform.com/open-source/victory
- Experiment with all Victory components in this code sandbox
Getting started
- Add Victory to your project:
# npm
$ npm i --save victory
# or yarn
$ yarn add victory
- Add your first Victory component:
import React from "react";
import { render } from "react-dom";
import { VictoryPie } from "victory";
const PieChart = () => {
return <VictoryPie />;
};
render(<PieChart />, document.getElementById("app"));
-
VictoryPiecomponent will be rendered, and you should see:
Requirements
Projects using Victory should also depend on React. As of victory@34.0.0 Victory requires React version 16.3.0 or above
Victory Native
Victory Native shares most of…
3. Nivo
Nivo (also, built with D3js) wins two awards: The first is for its beautiful UI and the second is for the incredible “interactive documentation”. Instead of reading long docs, Nivo offers an amazing UI for playing and tweaking with your chart components. Then, whenever you’re ready, simply copy-paste your tweaked chart’s code (and of course, with time, tweaking the code directly would be the preferable way but the journey to mastering Nivo’s API would be brief and painless)
plouc
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nivo
nivo provides a rich set of dataviz components, built on top of the awesome d3 and React libraries
nivo provides supercharged React components to easily build dataviz apps it's built on top of d3.
Several libraries already exist for React d3 integration but just a few provide server side rendering ability and fully declarative charts.
Installation
In order to use nivo, you have to install the @nivo/core package and then choose
some of the scoped @nivo packages according to the charts you wish to use:
yarn add @nivo/core @nivo/bar
Features
- Highly Customizable
- Motion/Transitions, powered by react-spring
- Interactive Components Playground
- Exhaustive Documentation
- SVG Charts
- HTML Charts
- Canvas Charts
- Server Side Rendering and HTTP API
- Patterns & Gradients
- Theming
- Responsive Charts
Discussion
Join the nivo discord community.
Packages & components
nivo is comprised of several packages/components, for a full list, please use the Components Explorer.
Guides
Backers
Donations are welcome to help improving nivo [Become a backer]
Open Collective Sponsors
…4. Vis
Vis, a library built by Uber, is similar to Recharts in its efforts to keep its component ecosystem as simple and modular as possible. The idea here is — if you know React you know Vis and that’s mostly true.
When it comes to aesthetics, Vis is pretty straightforward and simple looking.
A COMPOSABLE VISUALIZATION SYSTEM
NOTE: This repository is now under new management. Please reach out to the new administrators if you have any questions.
Overview
A collection of react components to render common data visualization charts, such as line/area/bar charts, heat maps, scatterplots, contour plots, hexagon heatmaps, pie and donut charts, sunbursts, radar charts, parallel coordinates, and tree maps.
Some notable features:
- Simplicity.
react-visdoesn't require any deep knowledge of data visualization libraries to start building your first visualizations. - Flexibility.
react-visprovides a set of basic building blocks for different charts. For instance, separate X and Y axis components. This provides a high level of control of chart layout for applications that need it. - Ease of use. The library provides a set of defaults which can be overridden by the custom user's settings.
- Integration with…
5. VX
VX is for those who have a very specific idea of how their charts should look and behave but are not yet ready to build their own D3 based component ecosystem. VX is unopinionated and designed to be built on top of. Plus, with VX, keeping your bundle size small is a much easier task than with comparable libraries.
visx
visx is a collection of reusable low-level visualization components. visx combines the power of d3 to generate your visualization with the benefits of react for updating the DOM.
Docs • Gallery • Blog • Discussions • Changelog • Getting started tutorial
Usage
Let's make a simple bar graph.
First we'll install the relevant packages:
npm install --save @visx/mock-data @visx/group @visx/shape @visx/scale
import React from 'react';
import { letterFrequency } from '@visx/mock-data';
import { Group } from '@visx/group';
import { Bar } from '@visx/shape';
import { scaleLinear, scaleBand } from '@visx/scale';
// We'll use some mock data from `@visx/mock-data` for this.
const data = letterFrequency;
// Define the graph dimensions and margins
const width = 500;
const height = 500;
const margin = { top: 20, bottom: 20, left: 20, right: 20 };…Conclusion
That’s my personal list of React data visualization libraries. Hopefully, you’ll find here something the works for you, whether you put more emphasis on aesthetics, ease of use or even the additional KBs added to your bundle size.
Cheers 🍺
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Top comments (9)
I see Recharts is still going strong, after all these years. We've been using it at some point in 2016 and 17, and it was quite good, I have to admit. Very easy to implement and learn, even for less experienced developers. Unfortunately, it misses some financial-specific charts, so we had to use yet another library and eventually we had two libs covered by a facade.
Nevertheless, nice list, I'll be picking one of those tools soon for my new project :)
I recently had need of a React visualization library and went with Victory due to the spectacular interactive docs that allow you to play with their chart components before integrating it into your project.
If you're not too specific with your requirements, I think Nivo is the easiest choice...
which chart component can I use for live updating data, I tried using Recharts, and I passed the state , to the chart but the value was never updated visually,
while printing in the console I saw that the state updated but it never showed in the chart
and yess Im using react
Unfortunally React-Vis has been deprecated. 😢
Good post!
I have problem with all React graph libraries that they don't allow empty graph X and Y scale values. The X and Y scale values are generated based on actual data.
thanks! for customization I assume that victory is better
Syncfusion React Charts - Rich & Interactive Graphs with Real-time data syncfusion.com/react-ui-components...