I wrote an article on why I love HoloViz. Here are some main points:
- HoloViz allows users to build Python visualization and interactive dashboard with super easy and flexible Python code.
- It provides the flexibility to choose among several API backends, including bokeh, matplotlib, and plotly, so you can choose different backends based on your preferences.
- It’s 100% open source!
- Unlike the other python viz and dashboarding options, HoloViz is very serious about supporting every reasonable context in which you might want to use a Python viz or app tool.
I also like Jim Bednar’s comment on HoloViz vs. Plotly. Copied and pasted here for reference:
"There isn’t necessarily a choice between HoloViz vs. Plotly. E.g. HoloViews is the easiest way to get a Datashader-rendered plot into Plotly or Dash; HoloViews encapsulates a whole set of logic and functionality about how to dynamically re-render plots that can then be dropped directly into your Dash app (see https://dash.plotly.com/holoviews). Plotly couldn’t do these things without HoloViz, as HoloViews and Datashader are HoloViz tools!
But if you’re asking about the cases where there is a choice to make, then e.g. for building a dashboard, you could choose to use either Dash or HoloViz Panel. You’d choose Panel because it is much higher level, letting you write even complex multi-page apps in short, easy to read, easy to modify, and easy to maintain code where you can largely ignore HTML and CSS details, focusing on Python. You’d choose Dash because it gives you direct low-level control over HTML and CSS and has a stateless model that lets you distribute your app to larger numbers of people for a given amount of hardware. See https://panel.holoviz.org/about/comparisons.html for a detailed comparison, and then try it out for yourself to see the differences!"
