I have used d3 for a few years now and with ChatGPT I find it at least 50% easier to set it up and troubleshoot issues.
Ask HN: What's the best charting library for customer-facing dashboards?
21–30 of 64 posts
Re: Ask HN: What's the best charting library for customer-facing dashboards?
#22Honestly, ChatGPT + D3 has been great for me. But YMMV of course.
Re: Ask HN: What's the best charting library for customer-facing dashboards?
#23There are a lot of fantastic libraries out there that can work. Best? How do you define that?
Re: Ask HN: What's the best charting library for customer-facing dashboards?
#24c3 is another built-on-top-of-d3 thingie: https://c3js.org/examples.html
Re: Ask HN: What's the best charting library for customer-facing dashboards?
#25As someone who has recently been deep diving D3 for fun, I will give you my opinion.
D3 is the king of data visualization written by Mike Bostock, a creative comp sci dude with incredible data viz and programming skills (love ya Mike)
The initial learning curve is kinda steep, but in reality it’s actually a really logical setup, you just need to build a few mental models. Without a doubt, I would pick D3. Top charting libs use D3 under the hood. It’s so god damn flexible you can build whatever you want.
Study d3indepth.com for a couple weeks, write a lot of code and watch some YouTube videos. The books are usually meh on this subject and outdated. Mike started Observable to make this passion of his profitable. It’s like Jupiter notebooks for visualizations using D3.
I’ve been wanting to write more and use visualizations to strengthen my writing and I’m picking a mix of D3 and standard JS/HTML to do it. Very satisfying
Re: Ask HN: What's the best charting library for customer-facing dashboards?
#26https://www.chartjs.org/ It's pretty easy to configure and understand. It's the 80/20 principal of charts, it is 80% of D3 functionality for 20% the effort.
+1 for chart.js - use it for most charting needs and even created a Wagtail app[1] that uses Chart.js on the frontend to render charts based on user input.
Re: Ask HN: What's the best charting library for customer-facing dashboards?
#27https://www.chartjs.org/ It's pretty easy to configure and understand. It's the 80/20 principal of charts, it is 80% of D3 functionality for 20% the effort.
I like chartsjs, better than what a $200bn company in Salesforce can come up with..
Re: Ask HN: What's the best charting library for customer-facing dashboards?
#28We use highcharts to power most of our charting (we're an embedded analytics platform) and switched over from from chart.js It's fairly powerful but also looks more polished out of the box. Some limitations on styling but that depends on your application/use case.
Highcharts is like "ol' reliable" when it comes to chart libraries, I first used it over ten years ago for a customer-facing investment banking webapp and as far as I know it's still around.
Charting libraries are hard, Highcharts got a lot of things right back then and I don't think it's stopped since then.
Re: Ask HN: What's the best charting library for customer-facing dashboards?
#29I've messed with a few. I really like Apache Echarts if you're looking for an all-in-one-can-do-anything solution with a good license. The downsides are that the docs can sometimes be a little obtuse. There are adapters for almost every front-end at this point. Nivo is a much simpler system that is styled by default and works much easier with React. If you're not doing complicated charts, it's my goto for the "I just…
+1 to echarts: While it can be more complex to start than the others, it remains fairly simple for the default graphs while providing enough flexibility to do pretty much anything.
Echarts isn’t hard to set up anymore now that GPT-4 takes care of the complexity.
Charts that used to take me days to set up and data-wrangle now only take minutes.
I suppose this applies to other libraries but I like echarts.
Re: Ask HN: What's the best charting library for customer-facing dashboards?
#30I've messed with a few. I really like Apache Echarts if you're looking for an all-in-one-can-do-anything solution with a good license. The downsides are that the docs can sometimes be a little obtuse. There are adapters for almost every front-end at this point. Nivo is a much simpler system that is styled by default and works much easier with React. If you're not doing complicated charts, it's my goto for the "I just…
I just tried nivo in my last react project and eventually had to reinstall echarts-for-react since most of my charts have 2+ vertical axises with different scales and it's not supported in nivo (I read there is a hack with stacking multiple charts on top of each other, but in echarts it's just a 1 line option).
I've been using echarts for 5+ years and I've yet to encounter a chart I couldn't make exactly like I needed.