7 Great Utility Libraries for Data Visualization With JavaScript

JavaScript runs the web. You can use it in a browser, you can use it on a server, and you can use it for mobile applications.
Today’s ecosystem is full of great libraries and frameworks helping engineers build powerful, user-centric applications for any platform.
Data visualization has been one of the hottest topics in the world right now, even before the Covid-19 pandemic. Companies sit on massive amounts of data and need to find ways to analyze, interpret, and visualize that data.
Whether you’re a data scientist or a programmer that has to deal with data visualization, here are seven great JavaScript frameworks to help you create stunning solutions.

1. D3
   https://github.com/d3/d3
   D3 currently has 90,000 stars on GitHub, making it one of the most popular JavaScript libraries available. It’s an amazing library for visualizing data with JavaScript using web standards (SVG, Canvas, HTML). It combines powerful interaction and visualization techniques to manipulate the DOM with a data-driven approach.
   It allows for binding arbitrary data to the DOM and then applying transformations to the document.
   Key features are:
   Full capabilities of web standards
   Extremely fast and supports large datasets
   Official and community-developed modules available
2. three.js
   https://github.com/mrdoob/three.js
   three.js is another great JavaScript library for data visualization that currently has about 60,000 GitHub stars. It wants to create an easy-to-use, simple, and lightweight 3D library with a default WebGL renderer.
   Key features are:
   Default WebGL renderer
   Supports renderer for Canvas 2D, SVG, and CSS3D
   Good documentation
3. Chart.js

Chart.js is a simple but flexible JavaScript-charting library for designers and developers that has about 50,000 stars on GitHub at the moment. It has great documentation, and it’s pretty easy to get started.
Key features:
Mixed chart types
Out-of-the-box stunning transitions
Open-source project
Supports eight chart types
Responsive

4. Paper.js

Paper.js is an open-source vector graphic–scripting framework running on the top of HTML5 Canvas. It offers a lot of powerful functionality to create and work with Bézier curves and vector graphics. It’s based on Scriptographer, a scripting environment for Adobe Illustrator. Paper.js is easy to learn for beginners but also has a lot of advanced features for advanced users.
Key features:
Easy to get started with
Well-designed and battle-hardened API
Based on Scriptographer, using HTML5 standards
It offers nested layers, groups, paths, compound paths, rasters, symbols, etc.

5. Fabric.js

Fabric.js is a great JavaScript framework for working with HTML canvas elements easily. It has both an interactive object model on top of the canvas element and an SVG-to-canvas parser.
With Fabric, one can easily create simple shapes, like circles, triangles, rectangles, or other polygons, using JavaScript.
Key features:
Unit tested
Modular architecture
Cross-browser functionality
It’s fast and follows semantic versioning

6. ECharts

ECharts is a powerful visualization and charting library for JavaScript that offers easy ways of adding interactive, intuitive, and highly customizable charts to applications and currently has about 40,000 stars on GitHub. It’s based on ZRender and written in pure JavaScript.
Key features:
Incubator project of the Apache Software Foundation
Free to use
Supports multidimensional data analysis
Active community
Charts for all sizes of devices

7. Two.js

Two.js is a small API for two-dimensional drawing in modern browsers. It’s renderer-agnostic, enabling rendering in multiple contexts, such as WebGL, Canvas2D, or SVG, with the same API.
Key features:
Focus on vector shapes
Relies on scene graphs
Built-in animation loop
Features a scalable vector-graphics interpreter