plotly

name	plotly
description	Plotly interactive visualization library. Use for interactive charts.

Plotly

Plotly creates interactive (zoomable, hoverable) charts in the browser. v6.0 (2025) drops big dependencies (Pandas is optional) and improves performance.

When to Use

• Dashboards: Streamlit, Dash.
• 3D Plots: Rotating 3D scatter plots.
• Interactivity: Users need to drill down into data.

Core Concepts

Plotly Express (px)

High-level API. px.scatter(df, x="a", y="b", color="c").

Graph Objects (go)

Low-level API. go.Figure(data=[go.Scatter(...)]).

Dash

The framework for building web apps with Plotly charts.

Best Practices (2025)

Do:

• Use Plotly Express: It covers 90% of use cases.
• Use WebGL: render_mode='webgl' for large datasets (>10k points).

Don't:

• Don't use it for static papers: Use Matplotlib for print.

References

• Plotly Python