One of common requirements for JavaScript developer is to make some charts. If task is simple enough one can feel free and pick whatever library first pops in google since they all pretty much do the same on most basic level. Care should be offcourse be taken if library is responsive or does not work in some popular browser.

This post will not aim to be comperhensive and guide that will dive into all details of every library but will give author’s insight based on dealing with various charting solutions out there.

When trying to meet requirements while using charting library one of first things that pops to mind is how many bells and whistles do you need to implement. If you go for react based solution then besides using react libraries one can always add not react library.

If one is willing to pay money and you are allowed to use non free licence one of best libraries is highcharts.
If not then one would pick by looking is the charting library you plan to go for has all the bells and whistles one would need.
If one has time then d3 based library or d3 would be way to go due to power it gives but in general people build libraries on top of it because it is lower level library.
If you find yourself in react world you could consider obvious choices like react-vis which is all the rage on github now or some of its follow ups.
If you need to meet demand of higher number of bells and whistles with industry battle harden performance with a lot of customisation then echarts from baidu is up and comming library theartning to rise above all others. It even has its scientific paper comparing it to other libraries. Pro is that it has a lot of customisation options and packs bunch of features out of the box and all that using react internaly so you can imagine how efficient updates are. Echarts even come with out of the box webgl although right now localisation support can be worked on.

I’ve used various things to chart stuff but echarts seems to have massive amount of work put into it and its free.

Although this might have had the tone of echarts plug I’d still when picking libraries not go for echarts off the bat because tailoring to one’s needs might be better in the end then just pulling out the big guns.