Navigating the Wide World of Data Visualization Libraries

Almost everyone has heard of D3, but what about the others?

Graphics and visualization developers often get presented with a simple yet difficult question: “Which visualization library should I use?”

Typically, making this decision is not about whether one library is “better” than another, but whether the specific library is more suitable for what the developer is trying to achieve.

To answer this question thoroughly, we need to start by better understanding the actual design space of visualization libraries. Based on a survey of web-based libraries (i.e. javascript packages), we could conceivably map out a landscape based on two attributes:

• Level of Abstraction — which maps roughly to two aspects: The first is the effort required from the developers to create a visualization. Higher-level libraries usually require fewer lines of code and/or fewer concepts to learn compared to lower-level libraries. Another is expressivity, or how much you can customize, which is in the opposite direction. Higher-level libraries will not let you customize much while you can have a lot more freedom and flexibility with lower-level libraries.
• API Design — The choices made by the authors which control how the code should be written.