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A software application has many moving parts, and data is at the heart of it all. But how do you make rows and rows of raw data understandable for your users? That’s where data visualization comes in.
JavaScript chart libraries are one of the most common ways to add data visualizations to an app. But with so many libraries to choose from, each with their own pros and cons, you can easily get overwhelmed. Instead of spending hours on research, we’ve done the heavy lifting for you.
In this article, we’ll compare the JavaScript visualization libraries, what you can use them for, and other alternatives for the job.
A Javascript chart library is a toolkit for developers to visualize data as charts. It comes with pre-built components for different chart types, which you can integrate into your broader codebase.
Back in the day, a programmer had to collect data from different types of databases, and manually code charts and dashboards to visualize that valuable data. Today, you can use a chart library as a reusable blueprint for your charts and dashboards.
The most common use case for chart libraries is creating visualizations within an app. For example, a dashboard in a social media scheduling tool showing post engagement across different channels.
For most developers, data visualization isn’t the main focus of their app. But let’s face it—visuals matter. With JavaScript charting libraries, you can create custom charts and graphs without starting from zero. Start from existing code and make the customizations you need.
Especially with open-source libraries, there are plenty of communities online (such as GitHub) where you can find support. If you get stuck solving a specific problem, there’s probably someone else that had it before. You can look up a solution quickly or go through tutorials and demos to find out how to do something.
With a little bit of research, you’ll easily find hundreds of chart libraries to use. You just need to find the one that suit your needs in terms of ease of use and visualizations. As you’ll learn later in this article, not all chart libraries have all the visualization types, so it’s worth shopping around to find the best one for your development team’s needs.
The short answer is: there’s no single way to create a chart in JavaScript. Every chart library uses different properties, and some will support different chart types than others. But in general, you’ll start with a code template and then customize charts to your liking. For example, chart libraries may let you:
However, do your due diligence before you start building charts with just any library. Make sure to write out all your requirements and choose a library that matches your needs. You don’t want to waste time building 90% of your visualizations, only to find out that your library of choice doesn’t support stock charts (or any other visualization you need).
If you’re just getting started with data visualization, here are the 11 most popular JavaScript visualization libraries to consider.
The most commonly used chart library is popular for a good reason. D3.js is one of the most powerful and flexible libraries out there - and it’s free! You can create really complex custom charts and it works with various formats such as CSS, SVG, and HTML. With dynamic DOM manipulation, you can build super interactive data products that change as your data changes.
On the flip side, it can be really daunting for developers with no experience in data viz. Expect a steep learning curve.
If you need full control over data visualization and interactivity, and you don’t mind a challenge, D3.js is for you.
August 2025 Update: D3 remains the most powerful low-level library, but it’s increasingly used inside higher-level frameworks (like Nivo and Visx) rather than directly. Still unmatched for flexibility, but the steep learning curve keeps it a niche pick for expert teams.
Chart.js is open-source and completely free to use. With eight different types of data visualizations, it’s not the most comprehensive library, but it sure is easy to use! It has detailed developer docs to help you with chart creation, whether it’s pie charts, line charts, radar charts, or others.
If you’re looking for high performance analytics, Chart.js is a great contender. It renders chart elements on an HTML5 canvas, which is much faster than rendering as SVG, like most D3-based libraries do. And with many available plugins, you can get even more out of Chart.js.
If you need a quick and easy solution for a small visualization project, Chart.js is perfect!
August 2025 Update: Chart.js has grown from 8 to 16 chart types, including financial and mixed charts. It now has better TypeScript support, streaming plugins, and strong adoption with over 2.5M weekly npm downloads, making it a top choice for quick projects.
Recharts is a composable chart library built on top of React components. To build charts, you can use SVG elements on top of a D3 submodule. It allows plenty of opportunities for modification, which is one of the reasons it’s used globally by companies such as Ahrefs.
While it can be a bit slow when working with large datasets, it more than makes up for it with its customization capabilities and ease of use. Its extensive TypeScript support is why Recharts is a popular choice among React developers.
Recharts is perfect for quick charting solutions in react projects, but definitely check out this piece on React chart libraries if you need more React-specific options.
August 2025 Update: Recharts is still the #1 React chart library with 24K+ stars and millions of npm downloads. It’s SVG-only and not responsive by default, but remains loved for ease of use and TypeScript support. Struggles a bit with huge datasets, but dominates most React dashboards.
Highcharts lets you create charts in SVG and then convert them to VML. While their motto is “simply visualize”, the dashboards don’t look as impressive compared to some other contenders. However, the backward compatibility with older Internet Explorer versions as well as the wide variety of demos make it an interesting choice.
If you want a middle ground between D3.js and Chart.js, Highcharts is great. It’s feature-rich, yet not insanely complex to use. They also have a very rich documentation library that can help you get started rapidly.
Highcharts isn’t free like some of the other tools here, but if you’re in need of polished visualizations for enterprise apps, it could be worth the cost.
August 2025 Update: Highcharts is thriving in enterprise apps, now with AI-powered features for data storytelling and anomaly detection. Still commercial-only (from ~$535/license), but widely trusted for polished visuals, compliance, and long-term support.
Looking for something that is open-source, easy to use, has beautiful visualizations and allows annotations? Apexcharts has you covered. According to their documentation, this JS library supports all charting features, including annotations, which are not so common among its competitors.
Besides charts, Apexcharts has a separate product called Reveal, which allows you to do embedded analytics and add charts into your website or product. Apexcharts supports Angular, Vue, React and other frameworks.
August 2025 Update: ApexCharts adoption is growing fast thanks to smooth animations and annotation features. In 2025, it added better React/Vue wrappers and real-time streaming support, making it a favorite for fintech and live dashboards.
There is a total of 90 charts that you can use in Fusioncharts, making it the most comprehensive option out there. Besides charts, you can also create dashboards and both look stunning, with interactive animations for the end user.
It supports jQuery, Angular, Django, React, PHP, Net, Ruby and many other types of frameworks.
Fusioncharts work and look great across different devices. All of this comes at a minimum price of $439/year which may be worth it if you need a great variety of visualizations across devices.
August 2025 Update: FusionCharts still offers the most chart types (90+) and wide framework support. But its $439/year license feels harder to justify in 2025 with strong free competitors. Usage is steady in corporate and government apps, but it’s losing ground to open-source options.
If you’re a fan of the Google ecosystem and you’re looking for something free, Google Charts fits the bill perfectly. It supports a good variety of data visualization formats, including scatter plots, geo charts, pie charts, calendar charts, and others. The visualizations look great across different devices and they are rendered using HTML5/SVG.
You can use Google Charts to create bar charts, Gantt charts, donut charts, scatter plots, maps and many other chart types. We wouldn’t use it for enterprise-grade apps, but for a simple lightweight app, it works just fine!
August 2025 Update: Still functional and free, but considered legacy. It hasn’t seen big innovation in years, and devs often move to newer, React-first tools. Best for prototypes, not long-term products.
If fast-loading charts are important to you, ECharts is a great contender. They support both HTML5 canvas rendering and SVG, making it possible to render large amounts of data in realtime.
This makes it a great library for advanced analytics use cases, like real-time data monitoring or visualizing time series data. It’s highly compatible with JSON data, and offers a Python wrapper too, which makes it a versatile solution.
August 2025 Update: Apache ECharts continues to excel in big data visualization with WebGL rendering. It’s widely used for IoT, logistics, and finance dashboards needing millions of data points. Still more complex to set up than Chart.js, but unmatched for scale and performance.
If you need to visualize geographical data, amCharts is worth checking out. They’ve bundled hundreds of country and regional maps to choose from, both in high and low detail. Their website offers a bunch of interactive demos to browse through.
August 2025 Update: amCharts remains the leader in map visualizations, offering 200+ prebuilt maps. It’s still commercial software, but strong demos and easy geographic integration keep it popular for global-facing apps.
Chartist is a great option if you’re looking for simple charts with plenty of customization options. What we like most is their animation and transition features: you can apply CSS animations to your SVG-based charts. With media queries, you can make charts look good on any device, whether it’s Windows, iOS or Android.
August 2025 Update: Chartist is now largely in maintenance mode. It’s lightweight and simple but hasn’t seen major updates. Still okay for hobby projects, but better modern alternatives exist.
If you want to leverage the power of D3.js, but you don’t want to go through the learning curve, have a look at C3.js. This API built on top of D3.js makes it easier to create charts without having to write D3 code. However, it is definitely on the simplistic side, lacking deeper functionality that other tools on this list do offer.
August 2025 Update: C3.js, the D3 wrapper, is also in maintenance mode. It lowers the barrier to D3 but lacks modern chart types and advanced features. Consider Nivo or Visx if you need React-ready flexibility.
Even though they are commonly used in development teams of all sizes, pure JavaScript libraries are not ideal for everyone - and here’s why.
Libraries like D3.js or ECharts give you full control, but everything still has to be coded by hand. Even with wrappers like Recharts or react-chartjs-2, you need experienced developers to maintain and customize them. In 2025, product teams are asking: why spend weeks coding charts when AI-powered tools can generate them from plain English prompts?
Chart libraries depend on fully prepped datasets. That means you can’t build until your pipelines are ready, which often adds weeks of setup time. Today’s embedded analytics platforms, backed by GPT-5 and AI agents, let teams connect data and spin up visualizations in hours instead of months.
Most JavaScript libraries can show charts, but they don’t handle real-world user expectations: multi-language support, role-based access control, or dynamic personalization. In fact, data in 2025 shows that 42% of SaaS users want more interactivity and 38% expect personalized dashboards - needs that libraries alone don’t meet.
Spending weeks coding chart libraries to test a feature is risky. If customers don’t engage, you’ve wasted time and money. In contrast, modern embedded analytics and AI visualization tools let teams prototype dashboards in hours and validate with real users quickly. This makes them a safer bet when testing whether customers actually care about your insights.
If you don’t have a team of skilled developers to spare, embedded analytics tools are a great alternative to chart libraries. With intuitive drag and drop interfaces, they are much quicker and easier to implement.
Especially for quick prototyping, product managers often prefer tools like Luzmo to charting libraries. In a few hours, you can go from prototype to a working MVP with a minimal amount of coding. If you want to gather customer feedback fast without a long product cycle, this is the way to go.
Even though they are easier to use, doesn’t mean they are rigid. While you can’t customize every small detail in a chart’s appearance, you can take customization pretty far. Offering insights in multiple languages, customized to the user who is logged in, interactive filtering,... It’s all possible.
Charting libraries are great for flexibility, but they are slow and cumbersome. Embedded analytics tools are quick and easy, but some product teams are hesitant to use tools that don’t allow full customization through code. There is, however, a third alternative that combines the best of both worlds.
Luzmo Flex is a powerful toolkit for building data products. It sits between “off-the-shelf” analytics and custom-built data products. Imagine a solution that lets you build a prototype quickly with only drag and drop, and then further customize it through code.
Product managers love the fast prototyping. They can launch an MVP with minimal code and get quick user feedback, without making their developer’s life hard. Developers, on the other hand, can build further on top of prototypes with all the coding flexibility they desire.
It can be as easy as changing the appearance of a chart, or as complex as building a custom AI-powered data analyst. With Luzmo Flex, the possibilities for your data product are endless.
Building data visualizations with your own team can seem like the only path you can take. However, there is always a choice and you don’t have to resort to using Javascript chart libraries.
Sign up for a free trial of Luzmo and try out a faster alternative to Javascript libraries without compromising on functionality. Save time and money, while giving your users real-time insights to make data-driven decisions!
Build your first embedded data product now. Talk to our product experts for a guided demo or get your hands dirty with a free 10-day trial.
