Comparing
The professional-grade JavaScript animation library — animate anything (DOM, CSS, SVG, Canvas, WebGL) with a timeline-based API.
Composable charting components for React — build line, bar, pie, and area charts from SVG with a declarative JSX API.
| Metric | gsap | recharts |
|---|---|---|
| Ecosystem | npm | npm |
| Difficulty | Intermediate | Beginner ✓ |
| Weekly downloads | 2.0M | 3.2M↑ |
| Latest version | v3.12.7 | v2.15.0 |
| Recipes | 2↑ | 1 |
gsap only
Shared
recharts only
Marketing landing pages, scroll-driven storytelling, complex animation sequences, SVG/logo animations, parallax effects, or any animation that needs to be framework-agnostic.
Dashboards, analytics pages, standard business charts in React apps, any time you want good-looking charts without a steep learning curve.
Simple React UI micro-interactions where framer-motion or CSS is simpler. GSAP's free tier doesn't include ScrollSmoother and some plugins commercially.
Custom/unusual visualizations (use d3), non-React projects (use Chart.js), performance-critical charts with 100k+ data points (Canvas-based charts are faster).
gsap
recharts