flekschas
commented
2 years ago I have never used Plotly before so I am not the right person to tell you when to use their awesome library over this one.
I am mostly guessing here but the following features seem to be unique to regl-scatterplot:
- pan and zoom plus rotation (as opposed to pan or zoom. It appears to me as if one has to switch between the two mouse modes in Plotly)
- point connections
- density based opacity encoding
- supports animated point transitions
- synchronizing multiple scatters
Also, I don't know how far Plotly scales. Both library can plot 1M points. On my MacBook I can also plot and smoothly pan&zoom in a 20M-point scatter plot with regl-scatterplot.
Plotly on the other hand supports:
- integrated data scaling (regl-scatterplot assumes you do this prior to plotting with whatever tool you like)
- different point shapes
- legends
Finally, Plotly can do a LOT more than just plotting a scatter of points. It's a whole graphing library developed by wonderful people, and it lets you create a lot of different visualizations! Regl-scatterplot has a single purple: 2D point scatters. It's also more low-level in that it requires you to build out the supporting UI you need. See https://github.com/novartis/peax for instance, in which we use regl-scatterplot.
I hope this helps.
As a disclaimer, for my comparison, I only went through the demos of regl-scatterplot (https://flekschas.github.io/regl-scatterplot) and plotly (https://plotly.com/python/line-and-scatter/). So take my list of unique features with a grain of salt.
parashardhapola
Hi,
Pretty cool work. I have been using the package for while and quite impressed and happy with the performance. Can you please comment on how does this compare against Plotly's WebGL implementation of scatter plots: https://plotly.com/javascript/webgl-vs-svg/#webgl-with-1-million-points ?
It would be interesting to have some general guidelines for when one would like to use one package over the other.
Thanks!