C3.js vs Plotly: What are the differences?

What is C3.js? A D3-based reusable chart library. c3 is a D3-based reusable chart library that enables deeper integration of charts into web applications.

What is Plotly? The Web's fastest growing charting libraries. Plotly.js is the only open-source JavaScript library for data visualization in the sciences and engineering. Open-source interfaces to Plotly.js are available for Python, R, MATLAB, and React.

C3.js and Plotly can be primarily classified as "Charting Libraries" tools.

Some of the features offered by C3.js are:

• Comfortable - C3 makes it easy to generate D3-based charts by wrapping the code required to construct the entire chart. We don't need to write D3 code any more.
• Customizable - C3 gives some classes to each element when generating, so you can define a custom style by the class and it's possible to extend the structure directly by D3.
• Controllable - C3 provides a variety of APIs and callbacks to access the state of the chart. By using them, you can update the chart even if after it's rendered.

On the other hand, Plotly provides the following key features:

• Feature parity with MATLAB/matplotlib graphing
• Online chart editor
• Fully interactive (hover, zoom, pan)

C3.js and Plotly are both open source tools. Plotly with 10.4K GitHub stars and 1.21K forks on GitHub appears to be more popular than C3.js with 8.42K GitHub stars and 1.4K GitHub forks.

Key Location, Helpful, and Scifabric are some of the popular companies that use C3.js, whereas Plotly is used by Wellzesta, Algo Edge Technologies, and ADEXT. C3.js has a broader approval, being mentioned in 20 company stacks & 5 developers stacks; compared to Plotly, which is listed in 11 company stacks and 10 developer stacks.