Plotly

Raised as a usability problem by 8 people on Hacker News over 13 years (2013–2025), in 7 threads.

People raised many different problems with Plotly, but no single problem has yet been raised by 3 people in 3 different months and threads.

Unreviewed issues were grouped by machine: Claude Haiku labelled each comment as a usability complaint, named what it's about and summed up the problem in a line, and a small model grouped similar problems. Nobody has checked them by hand. Expect mistakes.

The newest 9 complaints

Basic tasks that took three clicks now require guessing magic words in an LLM chat2025-12-07
Becomes so slow with more than a few hundred data points it's unusable2024-09-22
Every plot opens a new browser tab, so tabs pile up while iterating2022-09-17
API is undocumented, parameters undescribed, so users can't generalize examples to their own use2020-03-09
Hard to find how to do uses that go beyond the examples2018-07-06
Plotly's documentation is worse, and plotly is unwieldy for consumer-facing plots2017-05-18
Click-drag opens a context menu to zoom instead of moving the graph2013-05-08
Click-and-drag opens a zoom context menu instead of moving the graph2013-05-08
Zoom function is missing or not discoverable, so the chart feels confusing2013-05-08