Choosing the Right JavaScript Chart Library & Customized Designs

When creating a chart, you’re looking to tell a story with data. By thinking about the story you want to show, you can make more intuitive choices for your JavaScript data visualizations. Design and knowing what’s possible are integral to consider for your end audience—that is what brings the data to life and helps bring focus to what’s important. Ultimately, you need the data to look and perform in a way that communicates insights accurately, clearly, and effectively.

SciChart provides the tools to help you tell the story in the best way possible. For example, let’s say you’re building a chart displaying sales data for a stakeholder. You may want to draw their attention to a specific quarter that would be of key interest to them and showcase a success for the business. Function often takes priority over the design, but they must work together!

To tell your story and give your developers the tools they need to design and build that story, you need to choose the right JavaScript chart library. There are many libraries: some open-source and proprietary, others offering commercial use with a paid license. Choosing the right one takes a little background research, but our expert developers can guide you with the following steps.

How to Choose the Right JavaScript Chart Library

1. Check Which Charts Are Supported:

Your first port of call when choosing a JavaScript chart library? Make sure the appropriate charts are available and that the type of charts you need can be customized.

Not yet sure which chart type is the best match for your data? If you’re not sure which chart you need to display the data, it can be difficult to know how to visualize your data in the best way. Our tip in this instance is to select a JavaScript chart library that supports various chart types.

Why do we recommend that? Well, if you start with one chart type but want to switch to another that better matches your audience or application, this will be difficult with a library that offers a limited number of chart types. In fact, that could make it almost impossible to choose another chart type, as you would need to change the entire library, which is much more painful and time-consuming than choosing a library that already supports all the chart types you need.

It makes sense to choose a library that supports the chart types you need for right now, but also what you might need in the future.

2. Check How Often the Library Gets Updated:

Chart software should be updated at least once a month. This ensures bugs and vulnerabilities in the software are regularly fixed, and you’ll be up-to-date with the latest performance. The risk of not choosing a library that’s regularly updated is that the performance of your charts could become subpar or infested with bugs, and the end user will not have the good user experience they’re looking for.

3. Check the Performance Levels:

If you’re just looking to render a few data points, this isn’t such a big deal. Most libraries can handle between 100 and several thousand data points with ease. But hundreds of thousands or millions of data points? That requires more advanced performance levels, and it’s worth spending more time researching the chart library’s capabilities. There are not so many libraries that are high-performance and work with big data sets—this makes narrowing down your search for the right JavaScript chart library much easier.

As every screen has a limited number of pixels, good charting libraries reduce the number of points drawn to ensure high-quality big data visualizations across all devices.

Our tip? Look for examples and make sure they work. It’s not just high performance in general that matters; you need high performance for the specific chart type you’re looking for. For example, in SciChart, you have FIFO (First-In-First-Out) mode, where the data has a loop. Specific support for this type of data makes our library a good contender for anyone needing to apply this chart behavior.

4. Is Real-Time Data Supported?

Another thing: if you need to do a real-time chart, such as an ECG or ticking stock chart, check that accurate real-time performance is achievable with your chosen library. Static data is much easier to draw and render, but real-time data needs high performance, even with moderate amounts of data.

Rich, reactive, dynamic—real-time updates are where SciChart excels. Our software is designed to be ultra-high-performance and really shines when you want to manipulate data in real-time.

5. 2D vs. 3D Charts:

2D is a default chart visualization option that most companies opt for. However, some data is much easier to visualize in 3D, as you can rotate the chart and see different angles. SciChart offers 3D JavaScript charts to show the data from a different perspective. It’s useful for data with more than two dimensions and can be applied to many applications, such as presenting oil and gas data, scientific studies, and showing cost-efficiency.

6. Leverage Customizations:

JavaScript chart customizations enable you to change the design, interactivity, and behavior of your JavaScript data visualizations. With SciChart, you can leverage our JavaScript custom filter function.

Styling is a popular and useful customization that lets you change the colors of the chart, background, axis, labels, and tooltips. You can also change the stroke thickness and grid lines or add a background image to your charts. More sophisticated customizations include chart modifiers to display tooltips.

In case there is no SciChart modifier in the library, you can create your own customizations and behaviors. Not many libraries offer this level of customization and extensibility. This is where SciChart shines.

Interactive elements are also useful as they make the data more interesting and engaging for your end user. For instance, you can let the user skim the axis, rotate a 3D chart to view a new angle, zoom in or zoom out—the list goes on. Annotations also enable you to add text, tooltips, and draw elements that provide a focal point for the user and give the data a tangible story and sense of direction.

Interested to Learn More About the Data Visualization Possibilities with SciChart?

SciChart offers more flexibility and customization options with feature-rich APIs and genuine real-time performance built to handle big data projects. If you’re interested in how our JavaScript charting software can help you tell your data stories more effectively, why not sign up for our free community edition that lets you trial our charts for non-commercial use? You can also see how we compare to other JavaScript chart libraries in our guide.