Best React charting libraries to power data visualization

In today's digital age, data is ubiquitous and plays an increasingly important role in our personal and professional lives. We collect, analyze, and send data every day, and have seen the impact of well-presented data.

While data in its raw form may not be the most visually appealing, charts provide a powerful way to represent complex information in a way that is both informative and aesthetically pleasing. Charts are particularly useful for web applications, where displaying data in a visually engaging way is crucial to engage users and communicate important insights effectively.

React is a popular JavaScript library for building web applications, and there are many React chart libraries available that can help developers create powerful data visualizations quickly and easily. In this article, we'll cover the best React chart libraries and discuss their key features, advantages, and use cases.Whether you're building a dashboard, reporting tool, or data-heavy web application, this article will help you select the right library for your needs. But first let’s understand a bit about more React Charting Libraries.

What are React Chart Libraries?

Chart libraries are software tools that facilitate the creation of charts and other sorts of data visualizations. Although it is possible to construct charts from scratch for small projects, it may be more helpful to use a chart library for larger projects that include showing numerous types of data.

You can you construct dynamic, responsive, and even animated charts with various chart libraries available in today's React environment. These libraries also offer freedom to developers to customize charts.

To evaluate the top React chart libraries, we considered several factors, including their  features, quality of documentation, community adoption, and customizability. Although there are many React chart libraries, we will be focusing on the most popular ones.

Ultimately, for you choosing the right chart library would depend on your project requirements, the level of customization needed, and the developer's familiarity with the library. You can compare different React chart libraries based on these factors, to select the one that best fits your needs.

1. Recharts

Recharts is a reliable and robust charting library that offers a flexible and reusable way of building charts with React components. Its compatibility with React's component principle and D3's data visualization capabilities make it a popular choice for data visualization projects.

Features

Recharts is a popular React Charting Library with a variety of capabilities, some of which are as follows:

• Compatibility with the React component approach, allowing users to design charts using reusable React components.
• Created with D3, a popular data visualization package that gives extensive capabilities for creating charts.
• Provides stunning charts out of the box, which can be easily customized by altering the existing component's settings or adding custom ones.
• Only supports SVGs; does not support mobile or Canvas.
• Charts are not responsive by default, but it includes a wrapper component that can make them so.
• Excellent documentation that is simple to comprehend, making it simple for developers to get started with the library.
• CDN and npm installation options, making it‎ easy to incorporate into projects.

Documentation

Recharts is a charting framework created with React and based on D3 that allows developers to create configurable and interactive charts and graphs for online apps.‍

Community

Recharts is backed by a large, active, and skilled community of developers who contribute to resources and help maintain the library.

2. react-chartjs-2

React-chartjs-2 is a robust and popular framework that allows developers to generate charts using the familiar Chart.js library and gives various customisation options. Its animation capability and flexible charts make it a good choice for data visualisation applications.

Features

React-chartjs-2 is a popular React wrapper library for the JavaScript Chart.js library. It offers several features, including:

• Familiarity with Chart.js, makes it easy for developers who have used Chart.js in React before.
• It majorly draws support for Canvas only and renders on the client-side.
• Has over 5.7K stars on GitHub, which indicates its popularity among developers.
• Animation support and most of its charts are responsive by default.
• Has out of the box components for various chart styles along with the option to customize them.
• Can be installed using npm or yarn.

Documentation

Although react-chartjs-2 does not have comprehensive documentation of its own, its website showcases the different chart types and how to get started with them. The Chart.js library, on the other hand, has detailed and easy-to-understand documentation.

Community

React-chartjs-2 performs well across all modern browsers and has a large community of users and maintainers, making it a reliable choice for building charts in React.

3. Victory

Victory is developed with React and D3, which gives developers a wide range of customization options. Its thorough documentation and responsive charts make it an excellent choice for both new and seasoned developers. Victory can also be used to create both online and mobile applications because it has a React Native version that uses the same API.

Features

Victory is a React-based chart library and comes with a lot of features, that broadly includes:

• A good variety of customizable charts out of the box that are fully customizable.
• It supports SVG and, high-quality animations, which can further be customized.
• Has responsive charts that work well across different screen sizes.
• Has more than 10K stars on GitHub and is maintained by Formidable Labs.
• Can be installed using npm or yarn.

Documentation

Victory has a detailed documentation that makes the library beginner-friendly and easy to use.

Community

It is a robust and highly customizable library with a large community of users and maintainers.

4. Nivo

Nivo is a React Chart Library that uses React and D3 to offer a range of chart types and designs for users to choose from.

Features

Here are some key features of Nivo:

• It supports HTML, Canvas, SVG charts, and even works well with animations.
• Many of the charts provided by Nivo fit well across various screen sizes as they are responsive by default.
• Nivo makes use of React Motion to handle motion and transitions.
• Nivo can be installed by using  npm or yarn.
• Nivo offers a wide range of beautiful charts that can be customized without much hassle.

Documentation

It features a lovely website with extensive documentation that makes it simple to get started with.

Community

Nivo had over 11K GitHub stars at the time of writing this blog and is supported by an active community and maintainers.

5. React-Vis

React-Vis is a React charting library created by Uber, built with React and D3, it is one of the easiest React charting libraries to get started with.

Features

Here are some key features of React-Vis:

• It offers easy-to-use components that work similarly to React components, with props, children, and callbacks.
• It supports animated charts powered by React Motion and has drawing support for both Canvas and SVG.
• React-Vis has 1K+ GitHub stars and 1.2M+ npm downloads and is backed by Uber.
• React-Vis provides various types of charts, including line, bar, and pie, that are customizable and attractive out of the box.

Documentation

The library has easy-to-understand documentation, making it accessible even for those without extensive knowledge of data visualization libraries.

Community

React-vis, another popular React data visualisation toolkit, also has a thriving community that actively contributes to its development, offers support to fellow developers, and shares their experiences, ideas, and best practises for generating appealing visualisations.

6. BizCharts

BizCharts is a data visualization library created by Alibaba, built on top of the G2 library by AntV.

Features

Some‎ of its important features are as follows:

• It supports ‎SVG and Canvas and has a large selection of customization ‎options and‎ themes.
• ‎‎‎BizCharts is built to work‎ with both React and Vue, making it a versatile‎ alternative for developers working with various frameworks.‎‎‎
• ‎‎‎‎The library supports a variety ‎of data formats, including‎ JSON, CSV, and Excel, making it simple to integrate with a variety of data sources‎‎‎‎v.
• It i‎s built on D3 and le‎verages React component syntax.
• BizCharts is supported by A‎libaba and has 6K+ GitHub stars ‎and 23K+ npm downloads.‎

Documentation

The official documentation for Bizcharts offers a pretty detailed and comprehensive guide, to help developers get started with the library. It includes installation instructions, API references, and various examples of chart types.

Community

BizCharts, the open-source charting library, was proactively built for React. It is based on G2Plot, which is a powerful charting engine developed by AntV. BizCharts has a very active and growing community of developers, who contribute to its development and maintenance, provide support, build new features, and volunteer to fix bugs.

7. Visx

Visx is a data visualization library developed by Airbnb that is built on top of D3 and supports both SVG and Canvas.

Features

Here are some of its key features:

• The library offers a wide range of chart types and has a minimalistic design that is aesthetically pleasing.
• The library prioritizes performance and keeps bundle size small, making it a great choice for large-scale projects.
• Visx is designed to work well with CSS-in-JS libraries like styled-components and emotion.
• It uses React component syntax and has 16K+ GitHub stars and 295K+ npm downloads.
• The library is backed by Airbnb, which provides additional credibility and support for ongoing development and maintenance.
• Visx provides a highly customizable API that allows developers to create their own charting libraries on top of it.
• Visx also offers a range of helpful utilities and components, including scales, axes, legends, and tooltips, which can be used to enhance the functionality and usability of your visualizations.

Documentation

Visx is a strong library for creating visualisations in React, and its documentation gives detailed instruction on its capabilities and usage, making it easy for developers to construct spectacular and interactive data visualisations.

Community

Visx is a dedicated and thriving community of data visualisation enthusiasts and developers who contribute to its evolution and provide vital help, resources, and comments via forums, GitHub, and social media platforms.

8. ECharts

ECharts is an open-source charting library built by Apache.

Features

Here are some of its key features:

• It supports SVG and Canvas and is built on ZRender, a lightweight Canvas library.
• ECharts provides a wide range of chart kinds, including unusual ones such as Sankey diagrams, graphs, and heatmaps.
• It has over 200 data visualisation kinds and a plethora of customization options.ECharts is responsive by default and supports themes and addons.
• The library features excellent animations and aesthetics, making it an excellent choice for developers looking to create beautiful, informative charts with detailed data visualisations.
• It supports both light and dark themes, making it adaptable to a variety of scenarios.
• ECharts employs the Vanilla JavaScript syntax.
• It has over 54K GitHub stars and over 458K npm downloads.

Documentation

ECharts definitely provides comprehensive and much-organized documentation, making it much easier for developers to learn and, implement its powerful data visualization capabilities.

Community

ECharts has a large community of users and is backed by Apache.

9. ApexCharts

ApexCharts is a modern Charting Library built on top of D3, designed for building interactive and responsive visualizations in web applications. It offers a wide range of chart types and customization options, supports real-time updates, animations, and interactive features, and integrates well with modern web frameworks like React, Angular, and Vue.

Features

Here are some key features:

• ApexCharts is a charting library for producing interactive and responsive visualisations in web applications.
• It supports a wide range of chart types, including area, bar, column, line, heatmaps, radial charts, and treemaps.
• The library is built on top of D3, providing high performance and versatility.
• It offers real-time updates, animations, and interactive features such as zooming, panning, and selection.
• ApexCharts boasts over 26k stars on GitHub, which makes it a popular choice among developers.
• ApexCharts is backed by FusionCharts, a business that specialises in developing data visualisation tools.

Documentation

ApexCharts, provides helpful documentation and, contains a lot of examples to aid the developers get started quickly.

Community

The ApexCharts community, having over 26k stars on GitHub is active, supportive, and, is constantly pushing the boundaries of what's possible, with interactive data visualization.

Other React Charting libraries:

10. React-time-series Charts

The React time series chart is a charting library designed for React that specializes in displaying time series components. Its modular components are tailored to visualize network traffic data and time series data.

11. React Stockcharts

React Stockcharts is a Charting Library built for React that provides a wide range of templates for stock charts, that come great flexibility. It features an impressive collection of over 60 technical indicators and overlays, making it a great fit for displaying financial data.

12. Rumble-charts

Rumble-charts is a React chart package that visualises data with D3.js. Its designers describe it as a collection of React components that enable the building of versatile and composable charts.

13. C3.js

C3.js is a data visualisation library for JavaScript that can also be used with React. It is built on D3.js and its major goal is to assist the seamless integration of charts in web applications. With C3.js, developers can build reusable charts and edit them even after they have been presented on the screen.

14. Canvas.js

CanvasJS, a user-friendly charting library, that boasts of utilizing HTML5 and Javascript to produce charts. It is compatible with widely-used technologies and frameworks such as React, Angular, and jQuery, as well as server-side technologies like PHP.

15. Chartist.js

Chartist.js is a versatile data visualization library that provides a straightforward and flexible approach to creating various types of charts. It supports common chart types such as line charts, donut charts, and bar charts, as well as more advanced options such as animated and responsive charts. Moreover, Chartist.js is highly customizable to cater to different requirements.

16. Cubism.js

Cubism.js is a plugin for D3.js that focuses on visualizing time series data. Its scaling is designed to enhance perception, with small multiples aligned by time, allowing for easy and quick comparisons.

Frequently Asked Questions about React Charting Libraries

Q1. What factors should be considered while choosing a React charting library?

The choice of React Charting Library depends on individual factors unique to everyone's needs. Factors such as coding ability, willingness to design charts, access to pre-existing libraries, integrations, among others. It is recommended to compare different React apps to make the most appropriate selection.

Q2. Which React Chart Library is most commonly used?

Recharts is one of the most commonly used React chart libraries, followed by react-chartjs-2, Victory, nivo, and visx. These libraries serve as the foundation for creating graphs and charts in React-based web applications.

Q3. What is a chart in React?

A chart in React is a component that helps in rendering standard data visualizations based on an array of series and/or datums. These charts can be in the form of line charts, bar charts, area charts, heat maps, scatterplots, contour plots, hexagon heatmaps, pie and donut charts, sunbursts, radar charts, parallel coordinates, and treemaps.

Q4. How do you implement a chart in React?

For implementing a chart in a React application, you will first need a suitable chart library that matches with your project's requirements. Once that is selected, you can complete the installation via npm or yarn, import the necessary components, and then pass data as props to the chart components and configure any necessary options to customize the chart's appearance and functionalities. Finally, you can can render the chart components in the application, and the chart will surely display with the data you provided.

Conclusion

W‎‎hen it comes to choosing a chart library for your React project, it's important to k‎‎eep in mind that each library was created with a specific goal in mind. That's why it's important to compare the features of different libra‎‎‎ries before deciding which one to go for.

Consider the scale of your project when making a decision. So‎‎me chart libraries may be more suitable for smaller pr‎‎‎ojects with less complex data, while others may offer more advanced features that are better suited for large and more complex projects.

Now that you know which React Charting Libraries are the best, feel free to shortlist a few and check them out. You can even test them before taking the final call.

Once you have set up your charts, you can use React Testing Libraries to simulate user interactions on these charts and ensure that they are working fine.

Time to make your data look good.

Happy Coding!