Chart.js

About

Chart.js

Chart.js is a free open-source JavaScript charting library released under the MIT license, created in 2013 by British developer Nick Downie. The library renders responsive HTML canvas charts and is currently maintained by a volunteer community team. Chart.js is one of the most-installed charting libraries on npm and is widely used inside marketing sites, admin dashboards, small application UIs, and content management system plug-ins.

Chart.js was created in 2013 by British developer Nick Downie as an open-source HTML-canvas charting library aimed at web developers who wanted responsive, animated charts without the setup and complexity that came with D3.js or dedicated charting platforms. Downie released the library under the MIT license, and the project quickly attracted maintainers from the wider open-source JavaScript community. The current codebase is maintained by a volunteer team of contributors under the chartjs organization on GitHub, with community-driven governance and a modular architecture that has evolved through several major releases. Version 4, the current release line, ships as ES modules with tree-shakable components so applications include only the chart types and controllers they actually use. The library covers the eight most-common chart types out of the box: bar, line, area, radar, doughnut, pie, polar area, and scatter. A separate axis and scale system supports linear, logarithmic, time, and category axes, and a plugin architecture lets community authors extend Chart.js with matrix charts, sankey diagrams, financial candlesticks, boxplots, treemaps, and other advanced visualisations. Charts render on the browser's HTML5 Canvas, which keeps DOM size low and animation smooth even for dashboards with dozens of live panels, and responsive resize behaviour is on by default. Chart.js integrates cleanly with modern frameworks through official wrappers for React, Vue, Angular, and Svelte, and works equally well in plain server-rendered pages. Chart.js is distributed free through npm, jsdelivr and unpkg CDNs, and the chartjs.org site, and the source lives at github.com/chartjs/Chart.js with more than sixty thousand GitHub stars. Community channels include the Chart.js Discord server, the chartjs GitHub organization, a large Stack Overflow tag, and independent tutorial channels on YouTube. The library is a default recommendation for teams that need attractive charts without adopting a heavyweight BI product or writing custom D3 code, and is widely embedded in content management systems, admin templates, and small business applications.