Plotly

About

Plotly

Plotly is a data visualisation platform and open-source library ecosystem founded in 2012 in Montreal, Canada by Alex Johnson, Chris Parmer, Jack Parmer, and Matthew Sundquist. The company publishes open-source graphing libraries for Python, R, JavaScript, and other languages under the MIT license, and monetises through the Dash Enterprise application framework and Chart Studio hosted service. Plotly is widely used across scientific research, engineering, and financial-analytics teams.

Plotly, formally Plotly Technologies Inc., was founded in 2012 in Montreal, Canada by Alex Johnson, Chris Parmer, Jack Parmer, and Matthew Sundquist. The company set out to publish a scientific charting library that could be embedded across programming languages while keeping the client-side rendering consistent, and the core plotly.js JavaScript library became the foundation for language-specific bindings in Python, R, MATLAB, Julia, F#, and Go. Each language binding wraps the same JavaScript renderer so charts behave identically across environments, and the entire graphing library ecosystem is released under the permissive MIT open-source license. Plotly went on to release Dash in 2017, an open-source Python framework for building analytical web applications from Python callbacks, and Dash has since expanded to R, Julia, and Kotlin bindings alongside a paid Dash Enterprise product. The Plotly product family covers several audiences. Plotly Open Source ships the language libraries used by data scientists, researchers, and engineers to embed interactive charts in Jupyter notebooks, R Markdown documents, and web applications. Dash, and its paid Dash Enterprise counterpart, provides the higher-level framework for building full analytics applications complete with authentication, deployment, snapshot engines, and app-lifecycle tooling. Chart Studio, a hosted service, lets users create charts through a graphical editor rather than code, with free and paid tiers depending on privacy needs and export options. Plotly customers include NASA, the US Air Force, Bosch, Berkshire Hathaway Specialty Insurance, and several national research labs. The company is headquartered in Montreal and maintains a distributed engineering team. Community channels include the Plotly community forum at community.plotly.com, the plotly GitHub organization with more than a hundred repositories, a large Stack Overflow presence, and the Plotly Dash Twitter and YouTube channels. Plotly has become one of the most-cited scientific plotting libraries in Python and R alongside Matplotlib and ggplot2 and is widely deployed inside data-heavy organizations that need embedded interactive charts.