Comparing
The most powerful data visualization library for the web — bind data to SVG/Canvas elements and transform them with scales, axes, and layouts.
Composable charting components for React — build line, bar, pie, and area charts from SVG with a declarative JSX API.
| Metric | d3 | recharts |
|---|---|---|
| Ecosystem | npm | npm |
| Difficulty | Advanced | Beginner ✓ |
| Weekly downloads | 5.0M↑ | 3.2M |
| Latest version | v7.9.0 | v2.15.0 |
| Recipes | 1 | 1 |
d3 only
Shared
recharts only
Custom visualizations that no library supports, journalism/scrollytelling data stories, network graphs, geo maps, animated transitions between data states, or when you need to own every detail.
Dashboards, analytics pages, standard business charts in React apps, any time you want good-looking charts without a steep learning curve.
Standard bar/line/pie charts in a product (use Recharts or Chart.js — they're 10x faster to implement). d3's learning curve is steep.
Custom/unusual visualizations (use d3), non-React projects (use Chart.js), performance-critical charts with 100k+ data points (Canvas-based charts are faster).
d3
recharts