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Comment by frik | Hacker News Reader

The Github pages reads: "Built on top of d3.js and stack.gl, plotly.js is a high-level, declarative charting library. plotly.js ships with 20 chart types, including 3D charts, statistical graphs, and SVG maps." -- https://github.com/plotly/plotly.js

It feels a bit heavy in comparision to Highcharts or the open source Flotcharts. Though some chart types are pretty impressive, same can be said for d3.js in general.

But thanks for releasing plotly.js as open source.

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If you're looking for something less "heavy", I heartily recommend http://metricsgraphicsjs.org/, another charting library based on D3 and developed at Mozilla, which is very easy to use and renders elegant charts by default.

Does it support dual axis line charts? Didn't see it in examples. It's a must-have for any charts that display multiple metrics over time.

While dual-axis plots can be useful to have, there are some strong arguments from the data visualization community about how they are sub-optimal. https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&c...

Being able to display 99p latency and transaction volume on one chart is invaluable. Generally, if the metrics are correlated, dual-axis charts is the right solution.

I don't know, Highcharts and Highslide are insanely complex, but very capable.

We've been using Highcharts in our app for about 2 years and are generally pretty happy with it.

The one thing Highcharts doesn't do well is line charts for data series where the x-axis value isn't always increasing (ie data that loops around on the plot). Usually renders ok the first time but zoom breaks completely in our experience.

For us this issue is a big enough pain for our users (who have been stuck with scatter plots as the only working...workaround) that we'll probably move to plotly as soon as we can now that it's open source.

Out of curiosity, what kind of dataset would do that?

> It feels a bit heavy in comparision to Highcharts

But Highcharts is not Open Source :/

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