Chart.js is an open-source JavaScript library for drawing responsive charts with the HTML5 Canvas element. It ships eight common chart types including line, bar, doughnut, radar, polar area, bubble, scatter, and mixed combinations, with sensible defaults, legends, tooltips, and animation out of the box.
The site provides getting-started guides, configuration and API documentation, samples for axes, scales, plugins, and data decimation, plus migration notes between major versions and a gallery of community integrations for React, Vue, and other frameworks.
It suits dashboard builders, analytics products, and internal reporting tools that need clear, lightweight visuals without a heavy charting stack, as well as developers who want to customise appearance through plugins and callbacks.
Compared with SVG-based libraries it renders efficiently for large datasets but offers fewer DOM-level hooks; compared with full business-intelligence suites it leaves data preparation, drill-down, and export logic to the application.
Match the documentation to your installed major version since configuration keys changed across releases, cap the number of points rendered on small screens, and provide text or table alternatives for accessibility.
