11 React Chart Libraries for Eye-Catching Graphs and Charts

We interact with data daily. Think about governments that have to understand the citizens’ demographics for proper planning or business executives who have to deal with large amounts of data for proper budgeting and forecasting.

Data in its raw format may not be that appealing. However, we can make it easy to read and attractive through data visualization. 

Data visualization transforms data into visual representations for human insight and analysis. These visual representations come in different forms, such as charts, diagrams, graphs, and maps.

Importance of Data Visualization in a web application

• Facilitates decision-making: Decision-makers can identify trends and patterns in data and make decisions based on them.
• Improves user engagement: Data presented in visual formats is more appealing than text-based data. 
• Increases accessibility: Data presented in visual forms such as charts is more accessible to a wider audience than plain data in text formats. 
• Communicates complex information: Some datasets are complex. When such datasets are presented in visual formats such as charts, it makes it easy for the users to comprehend what is being presented. 

What are React and React Chart Libraries?

React is one of the most popular UI libraries. You can create powerful applications using React and its libraries. This JavaScript library has a strong community and is used by major companies such as Meta (formerly Facebook), Uber, and Airbnb. 

Even though you can create chats using pure React, having a library will speed up your development process and give you more features. 

A React Chart library refers to a collection of components that you can use to create charts. With a chart library, you can enjoy fast development as you don’t have to write code from scratch, reuse your components across the application and customize your code to suit your needs. These are some of the best React chart libraries.

React Charts

React Charts is a library that provides simple and interactive charts for React applications. This library provides custom styling and interfacing; users don’t need to know SVG file formats to use it. However, the user must understand their data to get the best out of this library. 

Key Features:

• Declarative: A declarative library like React Charts allows you to describe what you want to do with your code without worrying about what happens under the hood.
• Different chart types: You can present your data in charts such as line charts, bar charts, bubble Charts, and column Charts. 
• Hyperresponsive: The charts created using React Charts are responsive to different screen sizes. 
• SVG-based: The quality of some charts changes when zoomed in or out. React Charts components are SVG-based, which means they always maintain their quality. 
• Customizable: You can customize the contents of your charts to suit your personal or organizational goals. 

Recharts

Recharts is a composable library for creating charts built on React and D3. This library natively supports SVG and is lightweight as it depends only on a few D3 submodules. This library allows you to import only the necessary components, which means you can end up with a small application. 

Key Features:

• Composable: This library has reusable components that you can restructure to suit your needs. 
• Customizable: You can customize the components from this library to suit your data visualization needs. 
• Responsive: Charts created from Recharts can be accessed using mobile devices, computers, and screen readers. 
• Declarative: Recharts allow you to declare how you want your components to appear instead of following strict rules. 

React-vis

React-vis is a visualization library for creating charts in React. This library can be used as an NPM package or included in the main HTML page or via SASS. You can use this library to create different React charts ranging from scatterplots, heat maps, contour plots, hexagon heat maps, and bar/ line/ area charts. 

Key Features:

• React-friendly: The components in React-vis are similar to those in React. Like React, you can use this library’s callbacks and children elements. 
• Simple: You don’t need a deep understanding of React visualization libraries to start using React-vis. 
• Flexible: This library offers different building blocks for different charts. You can use these blocks to create different types of charts from these blocks. 
• Customizable: The library offers defaults that you can override to suit your needs. You can also customize the data in the boilerplate code provided. 

Apache Echarts

Apache Echarts is a free, open-source React visualization library for creating charts. The library is written in pure JavaScript and can be used as an NPM package. 

Key Features:

• Many types of charts: Apache Echarts has various built-in data charts for statistical purposes, relationships, directional information, and multi-dimensional data. You can also use the Custom Series feature to create a specific chart. 
• Optimized for different screens: You can zoom in and out charts created using Echarts without them losing their quality. 
• Multiple data formats: This library does not limit you to specific data formats, as you can choose between key-value objects and two-dimensional table data formats. 
• Multirendering solutions: Charts created using this library works perfectly on browsers and PCs. The library is also available for other programming languages through community support. 
• Dynamic data: Most charts display static data. Apache Echarts allow users to display data that changes based on different aspects, such as user inputs. 

React-chartjs-2

React-chartjs-2 is a collection of React components for Chart.js. You can add this library to your React project using a package manager such as NPM or Yarn. 

Key Features:

• Different components: React-chartjs-2 has several components, such as Chart, Line, Bar, Pie, Doughnut, Bubble, etc.. that you can use on your project. 
• Customizable: The components provided by this library can be customized to suit your needs. 
• Optimized: React-chartjs-2 allows you to create charts that work perfectly on different screen sizes. 

BizCharts

BizCharts is a data visualization library based on G2 and React. Alibaba created this library, which has been the charts component library used in most of its platforms. This platform is known for its conventional charts that are highly customizable and easy to use. 

Key Features:

• Strong expansion capabilities: The components provided by BizCharts are flexible and can be applied to different use cases. 
• Based on React ES6 grammar: BizCharts is based on the latest JavaScript standard, ES6. 
• Variety of data visualization charts: You can create charts ranging from graphs and lines to pie charts while using this library. 
• Easy to use: You don’t need advanced knowledge of data visualization to start using the BizCharts library. 

Rumble Charts

Rumble Charts is a collection of React components for building flexible and composable charts. You can add this tool to your React application using CDN or a package manager such as Yarn or NPM. 

Key Features:

• Various components: Rumble Charts has a variety of components that you can use to create different charts. 
• Composable: You can use the components from this library in any order. 
• Customizable: This library offers boilerplate codes that save you time from creating code from scratch. However, the components are customizable and can be edited to suit your needs. 
• Optimized: Rumble Charts helps you create charts that work on different screen sizes. 

Ant Design Charts

Ant Design Charts is a React charting library. This library provides high-quality charts by default; users can use them with little to no configuration. Ant Design Charts focuses on user experience, making displaying and discovering information easy. 

Key Features:

• Wide variety of charts: You can create different types of charts using Ant Design Charts ranging from line, radar, and bar to pie charts.
• Data binding: It is easy to bind data to charts when using this library. You can use dataSource or data properties for data binding. 
• Customization: Ant Design Charts offers defaults for building charts. However, you can customize these charts based on your app’s needs. 
• Data exporting: You can export the data displayed using Ant Design Components in various formats. 

Nivo

Nivo is a chart library created on top of React and D3 libraries. This library offers server-side rendering, a feature lacking in most libraries offering React-D3 integration.

Key Features:

• Different chart types: Using the Nivo library, you can create SVG, HTML, or Canvas charts. 
• Highly customizable: Even though Nivo charts have defaults, you can customize them based on needs. 
• Responsive charts: Charts from Nivo are accessible on mobile devices and computers. 
• Patterns: You can use patterns to group similar items in your chart. For instance, to create a chart displaying different car models, you can use a color scale and assign unique colors to each model. 

Visx

Visx is a collection of React visualization components that combines the features of D3 and React. This component library allows you to use individual packages or include all in your application.

Key Features:

• Unopinionated: This tool allows you to bring state management tools/ libraries, decide your styling approach, or even theming. 
• Built on TypeScript: TypeScript introduces features such as Types on top of the basic JavaScript functions and syntax. 
• Flexible: Visx is not a charting library but a collection of components that you can use to build a strong charting library. You thus have control over how you use these components when building your application. 

Syncfusion React Charts

Syncfusion React Charts is a collection of React components for visualizing data in mobile and web applications. This library has over 50 charts and graphs that cut across different applications. With this library, you can create high-performance and responsive charts and graphs with features such as zooming, selection, and tooltip.

Key Features:

• Data editing: You can add, edit or delete data in a chart created using this library. 
• SVG rendering: Charts in Syncfusion React Charts are rendered in SVG format, which means they don’t lose the quality even when pixelated. 
• Exporting: You can export React graphs into PDF files or images in formats such as SVG, png, or JPEG. 
• Globalization: This library allows you to customize your charts based on the currency and date format that suits your region. 
• Trendlines: Syncfusion React Charts allow you to display trends in your charts, such as price movements. You can generate trendlines for Cartesian-type series such as Candle, Column, HiLo, etc. 

Conclusion 

You now have a collection of React charting libraries that you can use in your applications, irrespective of whether you are building simple or complex charts. The choice of the library will depend on the features you are looking for and ease of use. 

You may use more than one charting library in your React application. However, using more than one library in the same component is not advisable to avoid conflicts. 

You may also explore some top React animation libraries for stunning visual effects.