# Vega-Altair vs HoloViews

## Key differences

- Vega-Altair has 3.6× as many GitHub stars as HoloViews (10.5K vs 2.9K).
- HoloViews had more development activity over the last 12 months: 326 commits vs 156.
- Vega-Altair is downloaded 55× as often on PyPI (10.4M vs 190.5K per week).
- Both are released under the BSD-3-Clause license.
- HoloViews is the older project: its repository was created in 2014, Vega-Altair's in 2015.

| | Vega-Altair | HoloViews |
|---|---|---|
| Description | Declarative statistical visualizations, based on Vega-Lite. | Complex and declarative visualizations from annotated data. |
| GitHub stars | 10,509 | 2,915 |
| Commits (12 months) | 156 | 326 |
| Contributors | 185 | 151 |
| License | BSD-3-Clause | BSD-3-Clause |
| Language | Python | Python |
| Status | Active | Active |
| Install | `pip install altair` | `pip install holoviews` |

Source: https://awesomedataviz.com/compare/altair-vs-holoviews/ · Data updated 2026-11-01 · Content: CC BY 4.0, Awesome Dataviz (https://awesomedataviz.com).