Plotly
Interactive, browser-based plotting library — produces publication-quality charts with hover, zoom, and 3D, often used with Dash for dashboards.
81
Hero Score
Popularity
88
Performance
45
Ecosystem
100
Maturity
100
Dev Experience
72
⭐ 18,677 stars⬇ 16.3M downloads/wkFirst release: Jun 2013Last release: Jul 2026
Async Support: NoPlugin Extensions: Very highSpeed: FastDoc Quality: Very highLearning Curve: Medium
Pros
- • Interactive HTML output by default with hover, zoom, and 3D charts
- • Rich Dash ecosystem for building full dashboards in pure Python
- • Strong support for maps, 3D, and scientific chart types
Cons
- • HTML payload size can be large for many or complex charts
- • Full interactivity depends on a JavaScript runtime in the browser
- • Two parallel APIs (plotly.express vs graph_objects) add a learning curve