Plotly — Interactive Scientific Visualization

Overview

Plotly is a Python graphing library for interactive, web-embeddable visualizations with 40+ chart types. It provides two APIs: Plotly Express (high-level, pandas-native) for quick plots and Graph Objects (low-level) for full customization. Output to interactive HTML, static PNG/PDF/SVG, or Dash web apps.

When to Use

• Creating interactive charts with hover tooltips, zoom, and pan
• Building multi-panel exploratory dashboards for data analysis
• Visualizing 3D data (surfaces, scatter3d, mesh, volume)
• Making geographic/map visualizations (choropleth, scatter_geo)
• Presenting data in web-embeddable HTML format
• Statistical distribution comparison (violin, box, histogram with marginals)
• Time series with range sliders and animation frames
• For static publication-quality figures (journal submissions), use matplotlib instead
• For statistical grammar-of-graphics style, use seaborn instead

Prerequisites