Plotly Express in Python

Plotly Express is a terse, consistent, high-level API for creating figures.


New to Plotly?

Plotly is a free and open-source graphing library for Python. We recommend you read our Getting Started guide for the latest installation or upgrade instructions, then move on to our Plotly Fundamentals tutorials or dive straight in to some Basic Charts tutorials.

Overview

The plotly.express module (usually imported as px) contains functions that can create entire figures at once, and is referred to as Plotly Express or PX. Plotly Express is a built-in part of the plotly library, and is the recommended starting point for creating most common figures. Every Plotly Express function uses graph objects internally and returns a plotly.graph_objects.Figure instance. Throughout the plotly documentation, you will find the Plotly Express way of building figures at the top of any applicable page, followed by a section on how to use graph objects to build similar figures. Any figure created in a single function call with Plotly Express could be created using graph objects alone, but with between 5 and 100 times more code.

Plotly Express provides more than 30 functions for creating different types of figures. The API for these functions was carefully designed to be as consistent and easy to learn as possible, making it easy to switch from a scatter plot to a bar chart to a histogram to a sunburst chart throughout a data exploration session. Scroll down for a gallery of Plotly Express plots, each made in a single function call.

Here is a talk from the SciPy 2021 conference that gives a good introduction to Plotly Express and Dash:

Plotly Express currently includes the following functions:

High-Level Features

The Plotly Express API in general offers the following features:

Plotly Express in Dash

Dash is the best way to build analytical apps in Python using Plotly figures. To run the app below, run pip install dash, click "Download" to get the code and run python app.py.

Get started with the official Dash docs and learn how to effortlessly style & deploy apps like this with Dash Enterprise.

Out[2]:

The following set of figures is just a sampling of what can be done with Plotly Express.

Scatter, Line, Area and Bar Charts

Read more about scatter plots and discrete color.

In [3]:
import plotly.express as px
df = px.data.iris()
fig = px.scatter(df, x="sepal_width", y="sepal_length", color="species")
fig.show()
In [4]:
import plotly.express as px
df = px.data.iris()
fig = px.scatter(df, x="sepal_width", y="sepal_length", color="species", marginal_y="violin",
           marginal_x="box", trendline="ols", template="simple_white")
fig.show()

Read more about error bars.

In [5]:
import plotly.express as px
df = px.data.iris()
df["e"] = df["sepal_width"]/100
fig = px.scatter(df, x="sepal_width", y="sepal_length", color="species", error_x="e", error_y="e")
fig.show()

Read more about bar charts.

In [6]:
import plotly.express as px
df = px.data.tips()
fig = px.bar(df, x="sex", y="total_bill", color="smoker", barmode="group")
fig.show()
In [7]:
import plotly.express as px
df = px.data.medals_long()

fig = px.bar(df, x="medal", y="count", color="nation",
             pattern_shape="nation", pattern_shape_sequence=[".", "x", "+"])
fig.show()

Read more about facet plots.

In [8]:
import plotly.express as px
df = px.data.tips()
fig = px.bar(df, x="sex", y="total_bill", color="smoker", barmode="group", facet_row="time", facet_col="day",
       category_orders={"day": ["Thur", "Fri", "Sat", "Sun"], "time": ["Lunch", "Dinner"]})
fig.show()
In [9]:
import plotly.express as px
df = px.data.iris()
fig = px.scatter_matrix(df, dimensions=["sepal_width", "sepal_length", "petal_width", "petal_length"], color="species")
fig.show()

Read more about parallel coordinates and parallel categories, as well as continuous color.

In [10]:
import plotly.express as px
df = px.data.iris()
fig = px.parallel_coordinates(df, color="species_id", labels={"species_id": "Species",
                  "sepal_width": "Sepal Width", "sepal_length": "Sepal Length",
                  "petal_width": "Petal Width", "petal_length": "Petal Length", },
                    color_continuous_scale=px.colors.diverging.Tealrose, color_continuous_midpoint=2)
fig.show()
In [11]:
import plotly.express as px
df = px.data.tips()
fig = px.parallel_categories(df, color="size", color_continuous_scale=px.colors.sequential.Inferno)
fig.show()

Read more about hover labels.

In [12]:
import plotly.express as px
df = px.data.gapminder()
fig = px.scatter(df.query("year==2007"), x="gdpPercap", y="lifeExp", size="pop", color="continent",
           hover_name="country", log_x=True, size_max=60)
fig.show()

Read more about animations.

In [13]:
import plotly.express as px
df = px.data.gapminder()
fig = px.scatter(df, x="gdpPercap", y="lifeExp", animation_frame="year", animation_group="country",
           size="pop", color="continent", hover_name="country", facet_col="continent",
           log_x=True, size_max=45, range_x=[100,100000], range_y=[25,90])
fig.show()

Read more about line charts.

In [14]:
import plotly.express as px
df = px.data.gapminder()
fig = px.line(df, x="year", y="lifeExp", color="continent", line_group="country", hover_name="country",
        line_shape="spline", render_mode="svg")
fig.show()

Read more about area charts.

In [15]:
import plotly.express as px
df = px.data.gapminder()
fig = px.area(df, x="year", y="pop", color="continent", line_group="country")
fig.show()

Read more about timeline/Gantt charts.

In [16]:
import plotly.express as px
import pandas as pd

df = pd.DataFrame([
    dict(Task="Job A", Start='2009-01-01', Finish='2009-02-28', Resource="Alex"),
    dict(Task="Job B", Start='2009-03-05', Finish='2009-04-15', Resource="Alex"),
    dict(Task="Job C", Start='2009-02-20', Finish='2009-05-30', Resource="Max")
])

fig = px.timeline(df, x_start="Start", x_end="Finish", y="Resource", color="Resource")
fig.show()

Read more about funnel charts.

In [17]:
import plotly.express as px
data = dict(
    number=[39, 27.4, 20.6, 11, 2],
    stage=["Website visit", "Downloads", "Potential customers", "Requested price", "Invoice sent"])
fig = px.funnel(data, x='number', y='stage')
fig.show()

Part to Whole Charts

Read more about pie charts.

In [18]:
import plotly.express as px
df = px.data.gapminder().query("year == 2007").query("continent == 'Europe'")
df.loc[df['pop'] < 2.e6, 'country'] = 'Other countries' # Represent only large countries
fig = px.pie(df, values='pop', names='country', title='Population of European continent')
fig.show()

Read more about sunburst charts.

In [19]:
import plotly.express as px

df = px.data.gapminder().query("year == 2007")
fig = px.sunburst(df, path=['continent', 'country'], values='pop',
                  color='lifeExp', hover_data=['iso_alpha'])
fig.show()

Read more about treemaps.

In [20]:
import plotly.express as px
import numpy as np
df = px.data.gapminder().query("year == 2007")
fig = px.treemap(df, path=[px.Constant('world'), 'continent', 'country'], values='pop',
                  color='lifeExp', hover_data=['iso_alpha'])
fig.show()

Read more about icicle charts.

In [21]:
import plotly.express as px
import numpy as np
df = px.data.gapminder().query("year == 2007")
fig = px.icicle(df, path=[px.Constant('world'), 'continent', 'country'], values='pop',
                  color='lifeExp', hover_data=['iso_alpha'])
fig.show()

Distributions

Read more about histograms.

In [22]:
import plotly.express as px
df = px.data.tips()
fig = px.histogram(df, x="total_bill", y="tip", color="sex", marginal="rug", hover_data=df.columns)
fig.show()

Read more about box plots.

In [23]:
import plotly.express as px
df = px.data.tips()
fig = px.box(df, x="day", y="total_bill", color="smoker", notched=True)
fig.show()

Read more about violin plots.

In [24]:
import plotly.express as px
df = px.data.tips()
fig = px.violin(df, y="tip", x="smoker", color="sex", box=True, points="all", hover_data=df.columns)
fig.show()
In [25]:
import plotly.express as px
df = px.data.tips()
fig = px.ecdf(df, x="total_bill", color="sex")
fig.show()

Read more about strip charts.

In [26]:
import plotly.express as px
df = px.data.tips()
fig = px.strip(df, x="total_bill", y="time", orientation="h", color="smoker")
fig.show()
In [27]:
import plotly.express as px
df = px.data.iris()
fig = px.density_contour(df, x="sepal_width", y="sepal_length")
fig.show()
In [28]:
import plotly.express as px
df = px.data.iris()
fig = px.density_heatmap(df, x="sepal_width", y="sepal_length", marginal_x="rug", marginal_y="histogram")
fig.show()

Images and Heatmaps

Read more about heatmaps and images.

In [29]:
import plotly.express as px
data=[[1, 25, 30, 50, 1], [20, 1, 60, 80, 30], [30, 60, 1, 5, 20]]
fig = px.imshow(data,
                labels=dict(x="Day of Week", y="Time of Day", color="Productivity"),
                x=['Monday', 'Tuesday', 'Wednesday', 'Thursday', 'Friday'],
                y=['Morning', 'Afternoon', 'Evening']
               )
fig.update_xaxes(side="top")
fig.show()
In [30]:
import plotly.express as px
from skimage import io
img = io.imread('https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/0/00/Crab_Nebula.jpg/240px-Crab_Nebula.jpg')
fig = px.imshow(img)
fig.show()

Tile Maps

Read more about tile maps and point on tile maps.

In [31]:
import plotly.express as px
df = px.data.carshare()
fig = px.scatter_mapbox(df, lat="centroid_lat", lon="centroid_lon", color="peak_hour", size="car_hours",
                  color_continuous_scale=px.colors.cyclical.IceFire, size_max=15, zoom=10,
                  mapbox_style="carto-positron")
fig.show()

Read more about tile map GeoJSON choropleths.

In [32]:
import plotly.express as px

df = px.data.election()
geojson = px.data.election_geojson()

fig = px.choropleth_mapbox(df, geojson=geojson, color="Bergeron",
                           locations="district", featureidkey="properties.district",
                           center={"lat": 45.5517, "lon": -73.7073},
                           mapbox_style="carto-positron", zoom=9)
fig.show()

Outline Maps

Read more about outline symbol maps.

In [33]:
import plotly.express as px
df = px.data.gapminder()
fig = px.scatter_geo(df, locations="iso_alpha", color="continent", hover_name="country", size="pop",
               animation_frame="year", projection="natural earth")
fig.show()

Read more about choropleth maps.

In [34]:
import plotly.express as px
df = px.data.gapminder()
fig = px.choropleth(df, locations="iso_alpha", color="lifeExp", hover_name="country", animation_frame="year", range_color=[20,80])
fig.show()

Polar Coordinates

Read more about polar plots.

In [35]:
import plotly.express as px
df = px.data.wind()
fig = px.scatter_polar(df, r="frequency", theta="direction", color="strength", symbol="strength",
            color_discrete_sequence=px.colors.sequential.Plasma_r)
fig.show()

Read more about radar charts.

In [36]:
import plotly.express as px
df = px.data.wind()
fig = px.line_polar(df, r="frequency", theta="direction", color="strength", line_close=True,
            color_discrete_sequence=px.colors.sequential.Plasma_r)
fig.show()

Read more about polar bar charts.

In [37]:
import plotly.express as px
df = px.data.wind()
fig = px.bar_polar(df, r="frequency", theta="direction", color="strength", template="plotly_dark",
            color_discrete_sequence= px.colors.sequential.Plasma_r)
fig.show()

3D Coordinates

Read more about 3D scatter plots.

In [38]:
import plotly.express as px
df = px.data.election()
fig = px.scatter_3d(df, x="Joly", y="Coderre", z="Bergeron", color="winner", size="total", hover_name="district",
                  symbol="result", color_discrete_map = {"Joly": "blue", "Bergeron": "green", "Coderre":"red"})
fig.show()

Ternary Coordinates

Read more about ternary charts.

In [39]:
import plotly.express as px
df = px.data.election()
fig = px.scatter_ternary(df, a="Joly", b="Coderre", c="Bergeron", color="winner", size="total", hover_name="district",
                   size_max=15, color_discrete_map = {"Joly": "blue", "Bergeron": "green", "Coderre":"red"} )
fig.show()

What About Dash?

Dash is an open-source framework for building analytical applications, with no Javascript required, and it is tightly integrated with the Plotly graphing library.

Learn about how to install Dash at https://dash.plot.ly/installation.

Everywhere in this page that you see fig.show(), you can display the same figure in a Dash application by passing it to the figure argument of the Graph component from the built-in dash_core_components package like this:

import plotly.graph_objects as go # or plotly.express as px
fig = go.Figure() # or any Plotly Express function e.g. px.bar(...)
# fig.add_trace( ... )
# fig.update_layout( ... )

from dash import Dash, dcc, html

app = Dash()
app.layout = html.Div([
    dcc.Graph(figure=fig)
])

app.run_server(debug=True, use_reloader=False)  # Turn off reloader if inside Jupyter