eCharts Alternative: Comparing Performance, Features & Support

In this series we’re looking at comparisons of JavaScript chart libraries. JavaScript is a huge ecosystem with many frameworks, plugins and libraries allowing you to create charts and graphs in your applications. Choosing the right JavaScript chart for your application is something which requires careful consideration depending on your requirements. In these helpful guides, we’ll be comparing popular JavaScript Charts to help you make the right decision depending on your needs.

Today we’re looking at Apache eCharts, more commonly known as ‘eCharts’. We’re going to discuss what is eCharts, what are the pros and cons of eCharts, how to improve eCharts performance and, finally, an eCharts alternative for enterprise software applications.

• What is Apache eCharts?
• What Are the Pros & Cons of eCharts?
• What Alternatives Are There to eCharts?
• How Much of a Performance Difference Does SciChart Have to eCharts?
• How Can You Reproduce These Results?
• What are the Advantages of SciChart vs Apache eCharts?

What is Apache eCharts?

eCharts is a free, open-source JavaScript library for data visualization, which supports a wide range of 2D and 3D chart types. It’s licensed under the permissive Apache 2.0 license and is renowned for being high performance and feature complete.

Based on HTML5 and Canvas, with some WebGL acceleration, for example in 3D charts, eCharts provides higher performance than standard SVG based or Canvas based libraries. It also has the ability to create complex dashboard visualizations.

What Are the Pros & Cons of eCharts?

Advantages of eCharts

• Wide range of built-in chart types: including specialized visualizations, such as heatmaps, treemaps, candlestick charts, sankey diagrams and 3D charts.
• More than 100 examples and demos, and some very impressive 3D visualizations too.
• Free and open source with a permissive Apache 2.0 license.
• Strong customization capabilities, including colors and themes, axis and labels, animation behavior, tooltip formatting and data transformations.
• Popular, with a large community and plenty of contributors.

Disadvantages & Drawbacks of eCharts

• Although simple charts are easy to build, complex dashboards often require large configuration objects. The declarative ‘option’ structure can become difficult to manage as visualizations grow more complex. This can lead to harder debugging, verbose configuration files or a steeper learning curve for advanced features.
• Performance limitations for very large datasets. While eCharts handles moderate datasets well, performance may degrade when visualizing very large datasets or many charts simultaneously, sometimes causing lag or frame drops.
• Documentation quality can be varied. While eCharts documentation includes many examples, some developers report that certain advanced features are poorly explained and deeper technical details can be difficult to find.

What Alternatives Are There to eCharts?

For applications which have demanding requirements, complex dashboards, handling real-time streaming data or big data requirements one viable alternative is SciChart.js.

One of the differences about SciChart.js is it’s designed for demanding applications that require custom features, high performance, or complex visualizations and interactions.

How Much of a Performance Difference Does SciChart Have to eCharts?

We’ve carried out performance tests of SciChart.js vs. Apache eCharts using Chart Bench: an open-source JavaScript Chart Performance Comparison application on four test hardwares. This application measures FPS (Frames per second), Memory usage, Initialization Time (time to first frame) and Data Ingestion rate (datapoints per second).

Tests were carried out in a variety of demanding 2D/3D chart conditions, including Line Charts, Scatter Charts, Mountain/Area charts, Candlestick, Column, Multi-chart scenarios, 2D heatmaps, 3D Point Clouds and 3D Surface meshes.

These were then run on four pieces of hardware: Intel i9 / nVidia 4090 workstation ARM Snapdragon Mini PC, an Apple M1 Mini and a Raspberry Pi 5.

How Did SciChart Compare to eCharts in Performance Tests?

Choose the filters below to select which metric to analyze: FPS, Memory, Init time or Ingestion rate.

Filter by hardware to generate a new table and table summary of results.

How Can You Reproduce These Results?

Performance results will vary depending on hardware, browser, operating system, drivers, and chart configuration, and may include some measurement noise. Readers can reproduce these tests on their own machines using our open-source Chart Bench suite and are encouraged to carry out their own due diligence when evaluating a chart library.

More details on how to reproduce the benchmarks, along with a detailed explanation of the testing methodology, metrics, test cases, and hardware / browser / OS versions, can be found in the following blog post.

Blog: Chart Bench: A Comprehensive Benchmark Suite to Compare JavaScript Chart Library Performances

Learn more about SciChart's open source JavaScript Chart Performance Test suite and reproducing benchmarks … Continue reading Blog: Chart Bench: A Comprehensive Benchmark Suite to Compare JavaScript Chart Library Performances

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What are the Advantages of SciChart vs Apache eCharts?

When compared to eCharts, what are the advantages of SciChart.js?

Designed for Real-Time, Big Data and Streaming Data Applications

SciChart is designed to handle large datasets efficiently and supports applications where data is continuously streaming or updating in real time, such as telemetry systems, financial trading platforms, IoT monitoring dashboards, medical signal analysis and scientific instrumentation.

The underlying rendering engine uses WebGL and WebAssembly, allowing it to maintain smooth frame rates while handling rapidly updating datasets.

eCharts can display dynamic data, but it is most commonly used for dashboard-style visualizations and analytics applications rather than high-frequency streaming datasets.

Built for Mission-Critical and Engineering Applications

SciChart is widely used in industries where charts are not just presentation tools but core parts of the application workflow, including financial trading platforms, telemetry systems, industrial monitoring dashboards and scientific software.

These environments require extremely stable chart components capable of rendering large datasets continuously over long-running sessions. SciChart’s architecture is designed to support long-running dashboards and intensive data workloads and helps to maintain stable performance during long-running sessions.

eCharts is commonly used for business dashboards and reporting tools, rather than specialized scientific or engineering systems.

Deep API Extensibility

SciChart provides a very extensible API, giving developers low-level control over rendering pipelines, custom modifiers, annotations, and data series types.

This allows teams to build specialized visualization systems with custom layouts, interactions and precise custom labelling, annotation or presentation of charts.

Because of this extensibility, SciChart can often be integrated deeply into large software products rather than simply embedded as a visualization component.

Enterprise-Grade Support and Licensing

Apache eCharts is open source and community supported, which is ideal for many projects.

However, SciChart offers commercial support and enterprise-grade SLAs, which can be important for companies building mission-critical applications.

Benefits include:

• Enterprise tech support with fast bug fix turnaround and a high release cadence, allowing you to save time and money in your projects.
• Extensive (hundreds of pages of) documentation with embedded codepens and hundreds of demos online.
• A dedicated team building and maintaining SciChart, allowing for rapid development of new features, fast turnaround on bug fixes.
• Long-term product stability and roadmap transparency.

This can be valuable for organizations building products where charting functionality is a key component of their software.

Optimized for Complex Multi-Chart Dashboards

Many enterprise applications require large dashboards with multiple synchronized charts, such as trading platforms with dozens of charts, monitoring dashboards with hundreds of signals, industrial control panels.

SciChart is designed so that many charts can coexist on a page while maintaining interactive performance even when multiple charts are displayed, allowing complex dashboards to remain responsive even with large datasets.

eCharts can support dashboards as well, but large numbers of charts or extremely dense datasets can introduce performance constraints.

Advanced Visualization Features for Technical Applications

SciChart includes features often required in engineering and scientific applications, including: per-point metadata and colouring, custom palette providers, annotations and overlays, specialised chart types such as polar charts, radar charts, advanced heatmaps and 2D/3D scientific charts.

These capabilities make it suitable for domain-specific visualization tools where the chart must represent complex scientific or telemetry data.

Learn more about SciChart.js

To learn more about SciChart.js or to discover its features, take a look at the following webpage:

Fast React, JavaScript Charts & Graphs for Enterprises

Learn more about the features & benefits of SciChart.js: an enterprise-grade alternative to Chart.js, which allows you to integrate complex & demanding JavaScript & React Charts your applications. … Continue reading Fast React, JavaScript Charts & Graphs for Enterprises

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Contact us to learn more

SciChart.js is a JavaScript Chart Library designed for complex, mission critical applications. Now with a free community edition. If you have a question or would like to learn more about our products and services, please contact us:

CONTACT USGET SCICHART.JS FREE