High-level tools¶
The full list of Python viz tools is very long and covers a wide range of functionality. Many users share similar needs, and can get very far using a high-level tool that covers the most common tasks succinctly and conveniently, typically by providing a simpler API on top of an existing plotting tool.
Pandas .plot() API¶
The longest-established of these tools is the Pandas .plot() API. This basic plotting interface uses Matplotlib to render static PNGs in a Jupyter notebook or for exporting from Python, with a command that can be as simple as df.plot() for a DataFrame with two columns.
The Pandas .plot() API has emerged as a de-facto standard for high-level plotting APIs in Python, and is now supported by many different libraries that use other underlying plotting engines to provide additional power and flexibility. Thus learning this API allows you to access capabilities provided by a wide variety of underlying tools, with relatively little additional effort. The libraries currently supporting this API include:
Pandas – Matplotlib-based API included with Pandas. Static PNG output in Jupyter notebooks.
xarray – Matplotlib-based API included with xarray, based on pandas .plot API. Static PNG output in Jupyter notebooks.
hvPlot – HoloViews and Bokeh-based interactive plots for Pandas, GeoPandas, xarray, Dask, Intake, and Streamz data.
Pandas Bokeh – Bokeh-based interactive plots, for Pandas, GeoPandas, and PySpark data.
Cufflinks – Plotly-based interactive plots for Pandas data.
PdVega – Vega-lite-based, JSON-encoded interactive plots for Pandas data.
Other high-level APIs¶
Seaborn – Matplotlib-based high-level interface for drawing statistical graphics.
Altair – Declarative Vega-lite-based interactive plots.
HoloViews – Declarative Bokeh, Matplotlib, or Plotly-based interactive plots for tidy data.
Chartify – Bokeh-based interactive plots for tidy data.
Plotly Express – Plotly-based interactive plots.
