Open source alternatives to Matplotlib

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Matplotlib

Plotting with Python

Matplotlib is a comprehensive Python library for creating static, animated and interactive visualizations. It is the plotting library most Python data work is built on, and its documentation covers the full range of what it does, from a quick start guide to a detailed user guide, tutorials, a gallery of examples and a full API reference. You can install it with pip, conda, pixi or uv, or install a nightly build or build from source. The docs warn that the tkagg backend, which shows plots in a window, needs a recent uv and up-to-date bundled Python installs when you use uv, and they name other GUI frameworks such as PySide6 as alternatives. The reference covers figure and subplot creation with pyplot, subplot mosaics, and the plotting methods of the Figure and Axes objects. Topics in the guide include layouts, colorbars, axis scales and ticks, dates and strings, legends, colormaps, styles and rcParams configuration, text and annotations, and math text. The community section lists books, videos, tutorials and third-party packages that add styles, colors, plot types and backends. Matplotlib is maintained by a community of users and developers, and the site links the contributing guide, issue tracker and release notes. The project was created by John Hunter, a neurobiologist who wrote it to work with EEG data, and its stated goal is to make easy things easy and hard things possible.