Chartist Js

What do you like best?

The library is very light, just 10Kb to be embedded in your webpage and very easy to setup. It doesn't have any other dependencies which makes it extremely configurable and easy to use. its open source and documentation is very readable and clear for anyone to start customising it. On top of it, it makes use of SVG , making the charts objects as handy as DOM objects . You can style it in your manner using the DOM hooks.It provides the basic charts - line, bar, pie with at-most animations, labels and colours . The grid option is the best, it gives your graphs the rich UI experience. These are more than enough if you want to build a dashboard giving simple statistics around your data. Because of its rich responsive support for multiple screen sizes, you don't need to think about how the chart will look on small screens. It just works seamlessly across any devices you can think of . Making your focus only towards the data that you want to show on the graph and its processing.

What do you dislike?

The library just provides basic 3 chart types - bar, line , pie - These may not suffice if you want to show advance statistics or visualisations on your data. For example, if you want to show the network topology , you might need to look for library like D3.js or any other. Also, the tooltips, point labels, zoom , pan, axis title options are missing from the basic library options. If you want these , you need to install plugins separately which is kind of irritating. The charts are static in nature, you don't have any events mechanism if you click on any part of chart, you need to handle it on your own for now. The charts crash when large amount of data is thrown on them, the library is not designed to handle voluminous data. The charts work only on the modern Browsers like Chrome, Firefox and IE . The older versions are not supported by the library for now. So if you customers make use of old browsers, you cannot use Chartist.js.

Recommendations to others considering the product:

If you want to build out statistics which are simple like comparison between two entities - use bar graphs or line graphs, or distribution of a value across multiple entities - pie charts, and you want to develop them fast without getting an headache on how to integrate, style - CSS , or animations - then Chartist.js is the right choice for you. Its very easy and light to use. Will give you the styling by default and you are all started. However, if your statistics needs are advanced - say you want to build graphs or you are looking out for full control over your chart including panning, zooming, tooltips, labels , event mechanism on clicks, etc, then Chartist.js will fail to meet your needs. You should look for an alternative like D3.js or plotly.js. They provide wide and diverse variety of charts, and are more feature rich.

What problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

i used Chartist.js in one of my projects in which I had to prepare a dashboard for User Statistics across different regions and how long they were surfing our website. I didn't know about charts, how they had to be coded and styled. Chartist.js came to my rescue and I was able to create the dummy dashboard within 2 days to show to my seniors. It not only helped me to draw stunning stats, but was extremely easy to use, and work with by reading its documentation. The charts were automatically styled by the library and I didn't have to work much on the Ui for it. I just focussed my attention towards fetching the data for the charts. Later on, I just had to prepare a global styling which had to be fed to the library and all the charts started following the colour scheme.