# D3.js Reviews **Vendor:** Observable **Category:** [JavaScript Web Frameworks](https://www.g2.com/categories/javascript-web-frameworks) **Average Rating:** 4.2/5.0 **Total Reviews:** 19 ## About D3.js D3 (or D3.js) is a free, open-source JavaScript library for visualizing data. Its low-level approach built on web standards offers unparalleled flexibility in authoring dynamic, data-driven graphics. For more than a decade D3 has powered groundbreaking and award-winning visualizations, become a foundational building block of higher-level chart libraries, and fostered a vibrant community of data practitioners around the world. D3 “slingshotted the field into growth, diversification and creativity that has been unprecedented” and “changed how millions of data visualizations are created across newsrooms, websites, and personal portfolios,” remarked the Information is Beautiful 2022 Test of Time Award. The IEEE VIS 2021 Test of Time Award noted, “By creating a framework that was compelling and easy for web developers to use to author interactive visualizations, the authors have undeniably helped to bring data visualization to the mainstream. [D3] is a cornerstone contribution to this conference specifically and more generally to the success of our field as a whole.” D3 was created by Mike Bostock in 2011. Mike co-authored the D3 paper with Jeff Heer and Vadim Ogievetsky at Stanford. Jason Davies made major contributions to D3 from 2011 to 2013, most notably to D3’s geographic projection system. Philippe Rivière has been a major contributor to D3 and its documentation since 2016. Over the years, countless kind individuals have contributed to D3 by sharing code and ideas, by teaching and answering questions, and by bringing people together to further the practice of visualization. Mike and Philippe now maintain D3 and Observable Plot at Observable. ## D3.js Reviews ### 1. D3.js for Data Visualization **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Phuong B. | Software Developer, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** January 27, 2021 **What do you like best about D3.js?** - Wide variety of visualization collections. - It is very easy to customize using D3.js. Animations, Interactivity, and data-driven plots make it a great framework to use. - JSON and CSV, all formats are integrable and converted to have data flexibility in D3.js. - Mostly heat maps, transitions, and effects are achieved using D3.js. - Easy to customize existing visualization collections and add extended functionality. - It takes some learning curve, but after that, it's easy to reuse across multiple similar problems with little changes. **What do you dislike about D3.js?** - Documentation can be improved a little more. - Requires web development experience. - Hard to code, not a kids play toy. - More innovative visualization charts can be added. - Also, the development community to answer questions and more educational videos to make our learning path easier. - Has a steep initial learning curve. - It is slow when dealing with really large datasets. - Not great for making maps. **Recommendations to others considering D3.js:** D3.js is appropriate when you have a pre-requisite knowledge of JavaScript. One must find alternatives if they don't have prior experience with JS. It is great for visualizing with medium and small size datasets. It's also great for prototyping visualizations quickly and sharing on the web so others can view them without having to install any software on their machines. **What problems is D3.js solving and how is that benefiting you?** I use D3js for all my data visualization problems and cases. I use it more often than other data visualization tools because of the ease and flexibility of the tool. Business problems that are addressed are data visualization. ### 2. One of the best data visualization libraries for web **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Raj T. | Product Designer, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** January 27, 2021 **What do you like best about D3.js?** The user experience on the website is good. The examples are detailed and easy to understand. The default transitions are also good. The level of control and customization is pretty decent. **What do you dislike about D3.js?** The support for ReactJS is missing. Also, the options to customize the colour palette are not the best. **Recommendations to others considering D3.js:** D3 is one of the most popular data visualization libraries on the web. It is currently not optimized for React but either way you can not go wrong with it. **What problems is D3.js solving and how is that benefiting you?** We frequently use D3js in building a dashboard for our web application. It helps visualize the data easily and maintain the focus on the business needs without wasting a lot of time on the implementation ### 3. I'm using d3 to make the visualize chart to show my customer business **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Nhan T. | Architect, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** February 26, 2021 **What do you like best about D3.js?** It seems to base on canvas and a lot of examples to learn **What do you dislike about D3.js?** Not sure which reason I dislike it, I can say that one thing is I need to write too much code. I hope it will more simple. **What problems is D3.js solving and how is that benefiting you?** I have the requirement to create and customize the design of some dashboard charts, with support in realtime and need more performance. ### 4. Best library for Analytics and very responsive **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** G V. | Senior Software Engineer, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** January 18, 2021 **What do you like best about D3.js?** The variety of graphs are wide and very easy to integrate and gives very responsive web and mobile graphs, keep going guys !! **What do you dislike about D3.js?** Nothing like that everything is great as of now **Recommendations to others considering D3.js:** Highly Recommended **What problems is D3.js solving and how is that benefiting you?** I had to display network usage details in my application and i used D3js to display complete graphical representation of data and the customisation is really easy and they got really great options to customise the graphs and very easy to integrate and maintain ### 5. I have around 9 years of experiance in frontend technologies **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Vijay D. | Software Engineer, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** January 27, 2021 **What do you like best about D3.js?** Simple and easy for data driven development **What do you dislike about D3.js?** Need some extra knowledge related to understand d3js code not like high-charts import and use only few tricks knowing is fine. **What problems is D3.js solving and how is that benefiting you?** Main is data driven development ### 6. D3.js Review **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Alex P. | Senior Software Engineer, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** January 18, 2021 **What do you like best about D3.js?** flexibility, easy to learn, clean codebase **What do you dislike about D3.js?** working code examples, snippets, tutorials **Recommendations to others considering D3.js:** Nice framework to solve data visualization issues **What problems is D3.js solving and how is that benefiting you?** Data visualization, custom charts implementation ### 7. Data-Driven Documents with JavaScript: D3js **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Michael S. | Project Manager, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** April 01, 2020 **What do you like best about D3.js?** From the Commandline or IDE (atom, vim, emacs, intelliJ, eclipse, vscode...) you can use your code to write beautiful visualizations of your data in the browser(DOM). You could style, transform and add dynamics to them. Over Scalable Vector Graphics, svg the visualizations can be represented as text/grafix, diagrams or charts. It's JS so formats are yours (eg JSON ) also data is yours so choose your database/lake. The api has the math, physics, logics, time, geographcis, stars, clouds ...at your fingertips. Use it: Just for fun Pimp Website Pimp Presentation, yes also Business Presentations Visualize math and the like animate and visualize all the above including text do all the above freestyler and rock the web What struck me first was this demo https://scriptonofficial.github.io/3d-shader-image-transition/ Hint: 3D experience like Blender, Photosphop, Package Design might be helpful Scala, Python, Java and pure zshell or node might fuel your imagination **What do you dislike about D3.js?** Your hunger for much more RAM/Processors will grow in 3 Dimensions from now on. **Recommendations to others considering D3.js:** Play with it and have some water near you, you might not be able to take your eyes off the screen. **What problems is D3.js solving and how is that benefiting you?** Business Presentations, Web and Video. It is v*e*r*y flexible and brings back the physics (advanced) chemistry to envision new designs. People want more once they saw it live. Fade in a mechanical project, zoom around, enlarge and add sound and animate it, zoom in and see the drive shaft moving .... ### 8. Nice data rendered **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Information Technology and Services | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** January 26, 2021 **What do you like best about D3.js?** The library its pretty big, allows you to to a lot of stuff **What do you dislike about D3.js?** The docs tend to be very confusing and not easy to find stuff **What problems is D3.js solving and how is that benefiting you?** I can render any type of data ### 9. Quick to use **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Financial Services | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** January 11, 2021 **What do you like best about D3.js?** Visuals in good standards! The library is very easy to plug-in and use. **What do you dislike about D3.js?** I feel that the GUI can be more user friendly **Recommendations to others considering D3.js:** It’s best on visuals like charts and transitions **What problems is D3.js solving and how is that benefiting you?** Use drawing charts, Donut chart! ### 10. D3js is the most amazing thing you'll see on the web. **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Brian S. | Web Developer, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** October 13, 2019 **What do you like best about D3.js?** D3 is a collection of breath-taking charts you can apply to your data to not only to visualize but to also captivate. It is a living piece of art. The live demos are unbelievable, they show that there are not limits to what you can do with the library and javascript as long as you're creative. **What do you dislike about D3.js?** D3 charts are more difficult to implement in a project as compared to other javascript chart libraries but once you learn how to, the results are impressive. **What problems is D3.js solving and how is that benefiting you?** D3 library gives you a platform to impress audiences and express creativity with mere statistical date ### 11. Ease of using d3.js **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Manasa P. | Manasa Pola, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** March 21, 2019 **What do you like best about D3.js?** Data-Driven Documents is a javascript library is used when you wanted to visualize your data. I also provide interactive visualization capability. It is easy for a person who knows javascript and wants to visualize the data. There are many different inbuilt templates that you can use. Those resources are found on d3.js GitHub. This is used in case of large data. It is easily understood with minimum javascript knowledge. All that you have to do is just import the d3.js library statement in the code which is you are using. It automatically takes the library when you have are connected to the internet. **What do you dislike about D3.js?** Without using templates building it from the scratch is really time-consuming sometimes. Finding the right template which suits your data is also time-consuming. One more thing is it only supports Mozilla Firefox browser only sometimes. Some animations or canvas are not visible in google chrome. Top achieve some functionalities you also have to use jQuery d3.js doesn' standalone support some features that you want to implement. You have to be very careful when debugging you can use console log help while debugging any functionalities. d3.js can process any amount of data but you have to be careful while assigning it to the canvas. Scales in the UI are like normal quadrant system. **Recommendations to others considering D3.js:** Have prior knowledge of javascript **What problems is D3.js solving and how is that benefiting you?** You can visualize any type of data. Visualization provides a lot of information in less time. ### 12. D3.JS Data Visualization **Rating:** 3.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Han-Tsung L. | Member Of Technical Staff - Software Engineer, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** January 29, 2019 **What do you like best about D3.js?** I learned about D3.JS while pursuing my bachelor's degree in computer science and finding this tool to be quite amazing. D3.JS provides a wide range of data visualization tools and templates right out of the box for visualizing a large dataset. A developer can download a quick to use template directly from their website and plug in the data to see updates instantaneously without the need to build their own visualization. **What do you dislike about D3.js?** The part that is least likable for this JavaScript library is the spectrum of choices that can be overwhelming when it comes down to finding the most intuitive visualization template for the data set that a person may be working with. At times it could be as simple as choosing a map graphical representation for data associated with geographical locations. Other times, it could be choosing a data visualization template from a vast of available options for depicting the relationships between letters and numbers. I find it best to simply pick one and test it out for deciding the best fit. **Recommendations to others considering D3.js:** When overwhelmed with the vast of data visualization options. Try one out to decide whether the template is the right fit. **What problems is D3.js solving and how is that benefiting you?** D3.JS was used for display relationships between most used/seen words on social media and display the statistics and relationships among different factors. It was fascinating to see the relationships between similar words depicted using D3.JS ### 13. Data visualization made easy **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Noah R. | Database Administrator, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** April 07, 2019 **What do you like best about D3.js?** D3.js is a great tool that lets me take complicated data sets and break them into understandable pieces and create visualizations to show management where things are going. **What do you dislike about D3.js?** d3.js is an open source piece of software and harder to use and get support for. **What problems is D3.js solving and how is that benefiting you?** D3.js is allowing me to deliver visualizations in a fast and effective manner. The benefits I've realized is stretching the SQL workflow to the web. ### 14. D3js **Rating:** 1.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in E-Learning | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** February 16, 2019 **What do you like best about D3.js?** The D3js library of javascripts is extensive. Anyone can create a customizable data visualization that can be shared with anyone who has a web browser. It's got all sorts of solutions to make your data come alive and be interactive. **What do you dislike about D3.js?** For any user who does not have a strong programming background, the learning curve is really steep in my opinion. To get really good at using this library, it will take an extensive amount of time and effort to learn and practice. **What problems is D3.js solving and how is that benefiting you?** I used D3js to create interactive data visualizations that helped senior management better understand the data they were working with and to identify trends and correlations that were not easily uncovered simply by looking at static summary tables. ### 15. Best dynamic library for creating visualizations! **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Vikhyat G. | Associate Systems Programmer, Defense & Space, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** January 31, 2019 **What do you like best about D3.js?** In terms of visualization, you can pretty much do anything! It is SVG based which is way better than canvas! **What do you dislike about D3.js?** Its not a plug and play library. You have to spend some time to learn it to actually get meaningful results. Not a bad point, but a point to consider! **Recommendations to others considering D3.js:** Rather than using any 3rd library, use D3js to visualize your data. You will get the result in the way you imagined! **What problems is D3.js solving and how is that benefiting you?** I visualize almost all my datasets using D3js. Benefits- 1. Amazing UI 2. Large community 3. SVG based ### 16. The best JavaScript library! **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Financial Services | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** February 21, 2019 **What do you like best about D3.js?** I like the ease of learning to get a decent visualization implemented easily and the ability to support large files. The wide range of examples is also helpful! **What do you dislike about D3.js?** It does get a bit involved when you try more advanced viz. **Recommendations to others considering D3.js:** If you are looking for a decent visualization library, I'd definitely give it a shot. It will most likely fulfill your use-case. Also, check out NY Times' visualizations -- they are all D3! **What problems is D3.js solving and how is that benefiting you?** Visualize data for dashboards. ### 17. It's a bit outdated **Rating:** 3.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Computer Software | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** March 15, 2019 **What do you like best about D3.js?** The best part is probably the data visualization component of d3.js. **What do you dislike about D3.js?** I don't like its syntax, not clear at all. Sometimes it's very confusing as to what arguments I'm passing. **What problems is D3.js solving and how is that benefiting you?** Data visualization and mapping. I have realized a lot of customers would prefer more visual products/ presentation. ### 18. Usability **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Marcos M. | Software QA Tester, Internet, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** January 09, 2019 **What do you like best about D3.js?** excellent program meets the specifications **What do you dislike about D3.js?** it must be more fluid, more practical for the users **Recommendations to others considering D3.js:** Improve the usability of the product more **What problems is D3.js solving and how is that benefiting you?** reduced my organization problems by 50% ### 19. D3Js Framework **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Information Technology and Services | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** March 15, 2019 **What do you like best about D3.js?** Flexibility to design and implement required Charts. **What do you dislike about D3.js?** Nothing to mention as the documentation is also good. **What problems is D3.js solving and how is that benefiting you?** All the Dashboard Charts required with different data of different date ranges. - [View D3.js pricing details and edition comparison](https://www.g2.com/products/observable-d3-js/reviews?section=pricing&secure%5Bexpires_at%5D=2026-06-10+09%3A37%3A21+-0500&secure%5Bsession_id%5D=82fe2ea0-3893-4485-9dfb-6aef0ac8f143&secure%5Btoken%5D=982cd7b3eed9f3b3516163bcf8ad32d6a4e276b95ee9f9e056989af7757d86e9&format=llm_user) ## D3.js Features **JavaScript Frameworks** - Libraries - Community - Widgets - Browser Support - Graphical Visualization - Mobile Support ## Top D3.js Alternatives - [Chart.Js](https://www.g2.com/products/chart-js/reviews) - 4.4/5.0 (120 reviews) - [Essential Studio](https://www.g2.com/products/essential-studio/reviews) - 4.5/5.0 (711 reviews) - [Progress Kendo UI](https://www.g2.com/products/progress-kendo-ui/reviews) - 4.4/5.0 (248 reviews)