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A concise grammar of interactive graphics, built on Vega.
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layout: page title: Vega-Lite Compared with other Languages permalink: /comparison.html

Vega and D3

Vega-Lite is a high-level grammar for visual analysis. It supports common chart types (bar chart, line chart, area chart, scatter plot, heatmap, trellis plots, …) and common data transformations (sorting, aggregation, faceting). In Vega, you have to manually construct axis and legends and you have to decide how to map the data to visual properties. Vega-Lite automates the construction of axes, legends, and scales from a high level encoding specification. This makes Vega-Lite specifications significantly shorter (about 1/10th). Vega-Lite is compiled to Vega and some visualizations that are expressible in Vega cannot be expressed in Vega-Lite.

Vega-Lite and Vega are visualization specification languages in JSON. The Vega website has a detailed comparison of Vega and D3.

Grammar of Graphics, GGPlot and Tableau

GGPlot and Vega-Lite both use a compositional approach to visualization design and are both grounded in the Grammar of Graphics. Vega-Lite adds common data analysis transformations such as aggregation. GGPlot is embedded in R so that data can be transformed outside of the visualization specification. Vega-Lite is implemented in JavaScript and thus available in all modern browsers.

Tableau is a graphical interface. The underlying formalism (VizQL) heavily influenced the design of Vega-Lite. Vega-Lite and Tableau both provide smart defaults.

Highcharts and plotly

Highcharts and plotly use templates for common chart types rather than composing primitive marks. Templates make it easier to add a new chart type but limit expressiveness and makes it harder to change just a single aspect of a visualization.