Data Visualization Libraries for React Developers in 2020
By: Veronika Rovnik
Tags: React, Web Development, Data Visualization, JavaScript, Analytics

For the second year in a row React stays among the top three most loved and acknowledged libraries by professional developers all around the world. And not without reason. Let me outline its main benefits for building user interfaces:

The system components are highly reusable and writing custom components is a mostly painless process.

Easy learning curve.

Due to the presence of virtual DOM , it’s suitable for scalable and high-performance apps.

, it’s suitable for scalable and high-performance apps. With the help of the diffing algorithm under the hood, React components are updated efficiently. This feature ensures better performance of the app.

It’s lightweight, open-source and SEO-friendly.

The community is active. At the time of writing, its GitHub repository counts more than 120k of stars.

All the aforementioned facts make this library one of the best for building high-quality graphical user interfaces.

To start using React like a pro, you should get familiar with a set of basic concepts at first. These include JSX, elements rendering, components, state and life cycles, a composition model and events handling. Though these terms appear a bit complicated at first, when you start learning you’ll notice that the learning curve is shorter than the one for Angular, for example.

Analysis in React projects

Have you ever experienced the necessity to enhance an application with analytical and visualization features and get insights from the data?

Well, so as not to let you get lost in a great range of tools, I’d be happy to present you the review of libraries for React which can be easily embedded into your website or app.

I’ve tried to pick the cream of the crop for data visualization and analysis but this list can be supplemented with other powerful libraries.

Charting tools

Victory by FormidableLabs

Victory is an ecosystem of reusable React components for creating charts. What immediately catches my eye is their stylishness and interactiveness. The animation is really smooth, check it out:

The components can be altered, wrapped or created from scratch. That means that the developers who prefer to customize everything will fall in love with this library.

Starting a visualization project is straightforward— you need to import the Victory library into your project, add the data and embed a component into the web page.

What is more, it has an additional version for React Native.

Besides, the experience with the documentation seems user-friendly and intuitive. I’ve managed to find everything I needed to start visualizing my data.

React-vis

Uber succeeds not only in the field of ride-hailing services but also in the development of visualization systems. React-vis is a library that offers an extensive collection of charts for React apps. Its components work similarly to plain React components we are used to. To create your first visualization, install the library via npm, import CSS styles and components you need, render them on a page and voila! The data is displayed in charts.

Among all the charts, a force-directed graph is what fascinated me the most cause before this I’ve tried to create this kind of graph using the D3.js library and found the entire process a bit intricate. React-vis simplifies this task a lot.