How is matplotlib outdated? It's just relatively low-level, so it might be quicker to use high-level tools like seaborn or altair (which use matplotlib as their backend), if that fits the situation. For heavily customized publication-ready plots (that means print), there is no alternative to matplotlib. The other two low-level Python visualization libs, plotly and bokeh (see https://pyviz.org/tools.html) focus on interactive plots, which is an entirely different use case! Bokeh just does not generate visualizations for print. Thus, it does NOT make matplotlib obsolete. On top of that, last time I checked, bokeh was far less flexible than matplotlib.