If you're building a trading app, we don’t need to give you the spiel about how important the charting component is. You will already know that if it stutters, lags, or looks off, users will often just leave and find a better option.
This post walks you through what to evaluate when picking a library, based on our experience building DXcharts at Devexperts and supporting trading platforms used by millions of users daily.
Can it keep up?
Rendering a few hundred data points is one thing. Rendering tens of thousands of live price bars, indicators, and drawing tools is another.
When building DXcharts, we built our core engine on HTML5 Canvas. That gave us a GPU-accelerated surface for high-density charting.
We can draw tens of thousands of points and user elements in real-time, with smooth panning and zooming. If the library you’re evaluating can’t handle that in a production scenario, it’s going to be a wall that you constantly hit down the line.
Real-time data is a non-neg
Live market data never stops. Every new bar, tick, or user annotation needs to flow seamlessly without glitches.
Look for a charting library that handles data flow in a way that keeps updates smooth, stable, and in sync. DXcharts, for example, is built with this kind of architecture in mind, helping to reduce edge-case bugs and ensure a consistent experience for your users.
Built-in trader features
Run-of-the-mill data visualization tools aren’t always designed with trading in mind. This is something to consider, because your users will expect features like:
- Live crosshairs with OHLC and volume
- Order markers and trade history
- Drag-and-drop lines for stops and take-profits
- Real-time annotations and alerts
- Synchronized timeframes across multiple instruments
DXcharts includes these out of the box because it was built specifically for financial use. If you’re using a generic library, make sure you think about whether or not you’re ready to build these from scratch, and if so, that it won’t compromise your UX.
How friendly is the DX?
It's highly likely your team will need to develop the charting library further to fit any niche needs that you currently have/or that evolve. This means you need to make sure you’re able to extend it, integrate it, test it, and ship it without it being a mission that derails progress.
How fast can you go from ‘npm install’ to a usable chart?
DXcharts Lite offers a one-day setup with basic charts. The full package includes mobile SDKs for iOS and Android, and supports frameworks like React, Vue, Angular, and Vanilla JS. If it isn’t typed, documented, or takes weeks to understand, it may not ship or scale at the pace you need.
Visual accuracy and testing
A pixel shift in a candle or ‘off-by-one’ tooltip can do some damage when a trader has money on the line.
We run end-to-end tests and visual diffs against reference charts to catch anything that might shift layout or break rendering.
If your library doesn’t playback chart screenshots or simulate real user flows, you’ll need to think about building QA tooling yourself.
Flexibility to customize and apply your branding
Ask whether your candidate library makes theming easy at scale, or forces manual overrides for every button and chart element.
DXcharts includes a full Theme Builder and API to customize every aspect of the UI, colors, fonts, logo placement, light and dark modes, without patching stylesheets.
Can it handle custom work?
Most trading apps don’t just plug in a chart and call it a day. They need their own indicators, drawing tools, and ways to tie the chart into other parts of the system.
DXcharts was built with that in mind. You can add your own tools, wire up custom logic, and extend the chart without fighting the framework. It’s flexible enough to handle whatever edge cases your product throws at it.
When choosing your library, ask whether it supports registering custom studies, exposing internal events, or lets you hook into its rendering pipeline.
Final notes: Red flags to spot early
- Demo looks fine until you add 20 indicators or live data (test it under load)
- No theming API beyond color pickers.
- No observable/event stream support (everything fires raw callbacks)
- Repo stalled, no recent commits or open issue handling.
- Hard to plug custom tools or logic into the core.
There’s a lot of noise out there, and a lot of charting libraries look fine until you try to build something real with them. The safest move is to set up a test project, feed it live data, try a few custom tools, and see how far you can go and what walls emerge.
We’ve spent years building and refining DXcharts, and we’ve hit most of those walls ourselves. If you’re weighing your options, feel free to reach out. We would be happy to give you a demo, trial or more information on how our charting library works.
Top comments (0)