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Comment by dsjoerg | Hacker News Reader

Hi, this looks pretty. I've been a happy highcharts user for several years; can you summarize what's good/better/different about chartjs?

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1. License: As other commenters have said, it's fully open source and free to use for commercial projects.

2. Canvas vs SVG: For my use case, using SVG for lots of data points really slowed down the DOM. Canvas doesn't have that limitation and is easier to export to images if necessary. SVG is nice because you can use CSS to style things.

FWIW, and I literally JUST learned this from another link in this thread: Highcharts now has boost.js [0], which lets you use Canvas, for when you need the performance boost.

[0] http://www.highcharts.com/articles/2-news/175-highcharts-per...

That's pretty cool.

This.

For custom stuff I use D3, but for the "standard"-charts I use Highcharts.

Edit: Seems like Chartjs is MIT, Highcharts is only free for non-commercial.

On the custom side, d3.js has more chart types currently supported, but we've added more with this release and made extending / creating new chart types 100x easier. Previously custom work was much easier with d3, but the gap is now significantly reduced.

Can you expand on this a bit? From skimming the documentation this still seems firmly in the camp of a few charts with a lot of options, as opposed to d3's do what you wish model.

There is a ton of documentation yet, but here's a link to what there is: http://www.chartjs.org/docs/#advanced-usage-writing-new-char...

It certainly isn't to the d3 level yet, but almost everything is exposed and extensible with the new API so you can create most any chart you can think of.

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