D3.js vs React

Overview

React

Stacks182.6K

Followers147.0K

Votes4.1K

GitHub Stars240.3K

Forks49.7K

D3.js

Stacks2.0K

Followers1.7K

Votes653

GitHub Stars111.7K

Forks22.9K

D3.js vs React: What are the differences?

<Write Introduction here>

Data Visualization Libraries: D3.js is primarily a data visualization library that allows for more control and flexibility when creating custom visualizations, whereas React is a JavaScript library focused on building user interfaces by using reusable UI components.
Approach to Updating DOM: D3.js directly manipulates the DOM to create visualizations, applying changes based on data updates through a reactive approach, while React manages a virtual DOM which efficiently updates the actual DOM in a more declarative manner.
Learning Curve: D3.js requires a steeper learning curve due to its low-level nature and the need to understand concepts like SVG, selections, and scales, whereas React's component-based architecture makes it easier for developers to learn and build applications.
State Management: React has built-in tools for managing state within components, enabling easier state management across the application, while D3.js lacks built-in state management mechanisms, requiring developers to handle state changes manually.
Community Support: React has a larger and more active community with extensive libraries, resources, and support available, making it easier to find solutions and troubleshoot issues, while D3.js has a smaller community focused mainly on data visualization.
Use Cases: D3.js is ideal for complex data visualization projects where custom, interactive visualizations are required, while React is better suited for building dynamic, responsive user interfaces for web applications with a focus on interactivity.

In Summary, the key differences between D3.js and React lie in their data visualization focus, approach to updating the DOM, learning curve, state management, community support, and use cases.

Share your Stack

Help developers discover the tools you use. Get visibility for your team's tech choices and contribute to the community's knowledge.

View Docs

CLI (Node.js)

Manual

Advice on React, D3.js

Cyrus

Aug 15, 2019

Needs adviceon

Vue.js

React

I find using Vue.js to be easier (more concise / less boilerplate) and more intuitive than writing React. However, there are a lot more readily available React components that I can just plug into my projects. I'm debating whether to use Vue.js or React for an upcoming project that I'm going to use to help teach a friend how to build an interactive frontend. Which would you recommend I use?

884k views884k

Comments

Cyrus

Aug 15, 2019

Needs advice

Simple datepickers are cumbersome. For such a simple data input, I feel like it takes far too much effort. Ideally, the native input[type="date"] would just work like it does on FF and Chrome, but Safari and Edge don't handle it properly. So I'm left either having a diverging experience based on the browser or I need to choose a library to implement a datepicker since users aren't good at inputing formatted strings.

For React alone there are tons of examples to use https://reactjsexample.com/tag/date/. And then of course there's the bootstrap datepicker (https://bootstrap-datepicker.readthedocs.io/en/latest/), jQueryUI calendar picker, https://github.com/flatpickr/flatpickr, and many more.

How do you recommend going about handling date and time inputs? And then there's always moment.js, but I've observed some users getting stuck when presented with a blank text field. I'm curious to hear what's worked well for people...

401k views401k

Comments

Damiano

Oct 27, 2019

Decided

Preact offers an API which is extremely similar to React's for less than 10% of its size (and createElement is renamed to h, which makes the overall bundle a lot smaller). Although it is less compatible with other libraries than the latter (and its ecosystem is nowhere as developed), this is generally not a problem as Preact exposes the preact/compat API, which can be used as an alias both for React and ReactDOM and allows for the use of libraries which would otherwise just be compatible with React.

25.6k views25.6k

Comments

Detailed Comparison

React	D3.js
Lots of people use React as the V in MVC. Since React makes no assumptions about the rest of your technology stack, it's easy to try it out on a small feature in an existing project.	It is a JavaScript library for manipulating documents based on data. Emphasises on web standards gives you the full capabilities of modern browsers without tying yourself to a proprietary framework.
Declarative; Component-based; Learn once, write anywhere	Declarative Approach for Individual Nodes Manipulation; Functions Factory; Web Standards; Built-in ELement Inspector to Debug; Uses SVG, Canvas, and HTML; Data-driven approach to DOM Manipulation; Voronoi Diagrams; Maps and topo.
Statistics
GitHub Stars 240.3K	GitHub Stars 111.7K
GitHub Forks 49.7K	GitHub Forks 22.9K
Stacks 182.6K	Stacks 2.0K
Followers 147.0K	Followers 1.7K
Votes 4.1K	Votes 653
Pros & Cons
Pros 837 Components 674 Virtual dom 579 Performance 509 Simplicity 442 Composable Cons 41 Requires discipline to keep architecture organized 30 No predefined way to structure your app 29 Need to be familiar with lots of third party packages 13 JSX 10 Not enterprise friendly	Pros 195 Beautiful visualizations 103 Svg 92 Data-driven 81 Large set of examples 61 Data-driven documents Cons 11 Beginners cant understand at all 6 Complex syntax
Integrations
No integrations available	JavaScript React Native AngularJS Bootstrap

What are some alternatives to React, D3.js?

jQuery

jQuery is a cross-platform JavaScript library designed to simplify the client-side scripting of HTML.

AngularJS

AngularJS lets you write client-side web applications as if you had a smarter browser. It lets you use good old HTML (or HAML, Jade and friends!) as your template language and lets you extend HTML’s syntax to express your application’s components clearly and succinctly. It automatically synchronizes data from your UI (view) with your JavaScript objects (model) through 2-way data binding.

Vue.js

It is a library for building interactive web interfaces. It provides data-reactive components with a simple and flexible API.

jQuery UI

Whether you're building highly interactive web applications or you just need to add a date picker to a form control, jQuery UI is the perfect choice.

Svelte

If you've ever built a JavaScript application, the chances are you've encountered – or at least heard of – frameworks like React, Angular, Vue and Ractive. Like Svelte, these tools all share a goal of making it easy to build slick interactive user interfaces. Rather than interpreting your application code at run time, your app is converted into ideal JavaScript at build time. That means you don't pay the performance cost of the framework's abstractions, or incur a penalty when your app first loads.

Flux

Flux is the application architecture that Facebook uses for building client-side web applications. It complements React's composable view components by utilizing a unidirectional data flow. It's more of a pattern rather than a formal framework, and you can start using Flux immediately without a lot of new code.

Famo.us

Famo.us is a free and open source JavaScript platform for building mobile apps and desktop experiences. What makes Famo.us unique is its JavaScript rendering engine and 3D physics engine that gives developers the power and tools to build native quality apps and animations using pure JavaScript.

Highcharts

Highcharts currently supports line, spline, area, areaspline, column, bar, pie, scatter, angular gauges, arearange, areasplinerange, columnrange, bubble, box plot, error bars, funnel, waterfall and polar chart types.

Plotly.js

It is a standalone Javascript data visualization library, and it also powers the Python and R modules named plotly in those respective ecosystems (referred to as Plotly.py and Plotly.R). It can be used to produce dozens of chart types and visualizations, including statistical charts, 3D graphs, scientific charts, SVG and tile maps, financial charts and more.

Riot

Riot brings custom tags to all browsers. Think React + Polymer but with enjoyable syntax and a small learning curve.

Related Comparisons

D3.js vs React: What are the differences?

<Write Introduction here>

Data Visualization Libraries: D3.js is primarily a data visualization library that allows for more control and flexibility when creating custom visualizations, whereas React is a JavaScript library focused on building user interfaces by using reusable UI components.
Approach to Updating DOM: D3.js directly manipulates the DOM to create visualizations, applying changes based on data updates through a reactive approach, while React manages a virtual DOM which efficiently updates the actual DOM in a more declarative manner.
Learning Curve: D3.js requires a steeper learning curve due to its low-level nature and the need to understand concepts like SVG, selections, and scales, whereas React's component-based architecture makes it easier for developers to learn and build applications.
State Management: React has built-in tools for managing state within components, enabling easier state management across the application, while D3.js lacks built-in state management mechanisms, requiring developers to handle state changes manually.
Community Support: React has a larger and more active community with extensive libraries, resources, and support available, making it easier to find solutions and troubleshoot issues, while D3.js has a smaller community focused mainly on data visualization.
Use Cases: D3.js is ideal for complex data visualization projects where custom, interactive visualizations are required, while React is better suited for building dynamic, responsive user interfaces for web applications with a focus on interactivity.

In Summary, the key differences between D3.js and React lie in their data visualization focus, approach to updating the DOM, learning curve, state management, community support, and use cases.

D3.js vs React

Overview