What's the difference between Dash and Plotly?

Question

I built a Flask app and i would like to embed a chart for my data using Plotly. Making some research on Plotly i found about Dash, and i'm having some troubles deciding which one of the two i need to use for my project. What's the difference between them?

Answer 1

I have asked pretty much the same question on Dash forums and Chris Parmer, the creator of Dash, answered it (how awesome is that?). You can read the full discussion here: https://community.plotly.com/t/plotly-ecosystem-explanation/53826/2

But the summary is:

1. You might want to use Plotly / Plotly Express if you want to add interactive charts to your existing pages here and there and your backend is using some server side language.

2. You might want to use Dash if you want to build a web app with interactive charting capabilities where everything (frontend and backend) is handled with the tools that Dash provides.

PS: Dash can also inject interactive charts to your existing pages using either iframes or Dash enterprise solution (paid).

Answer 2

Actually Dash was made by Plotly's creators as a way to easily implement a web interface and create dashboards with Plotly without having to learn javascript, html and other web technologies.

With Dash you don't make visualizations, you build an interface to display Plotly's visualizations.

It uses Flask under the hood so it is specially compatible with other Flask apps. For more info refer to Dash's deployment reference.

Edit:

The reference I point to used to have more information about how to work with Flask, but not so much anymore. There are plenty other tutorials out there though, e.g. this one.