Battle Royale — Comparison of 7 Python Libraries for Interactive Financial Charts

Comparing Matplotlib, Plotly, Bokeh, Bqplot, Cufflinks, Mplfinance, and Altair for building interactive candlestick charts

Photo by i yunmai on Unsplash

A candlestick chart is a data visualization that expresses financial data over time. It can show useful information, such as the movements of a currency, security, or derivative. Basically, this chart applies candlestick-like figures to express the opening, closing, high, and low prices during a period.

Various Python libraries can effectively plot a candlestick chart. Besides displaying a still graphic, some libraries offer an interactive outcome that allows users to interact with the result, such as tooltips or filtering.

Snapshots show some of the interactive candlestick charts in this article. Image by the author.

However, not every library is the same. Even though they can build the charts we want, each library has strengths and limits. Thus, this article will compare 7 Python libraries — Matplotlib, Plotly, Bokeh, Bqplot, Cufflinks, Mplfinance, and Altair — for creating interactive candlestick charts.

Before starting, this article will show simple steps to download financial data, which will be used later for plotting. Let’s get…