# HoloViews vs plotnine

## Key differences

- plotnine has 1.6× as many GitHub stars as HoloViews (4.8K vs 2.9K).
- plotnine had more development activity over the last 12 months: 514 commits vs 326.
- plotnine is downloaded 2.1× as often on PyPI (408.6K vs 190.5K per week).
- HoloViews is licensed under BSD-3-Clause; plotnine under MIT.
- HoloViews is the older project: its repository was created in 2014, plotnine's in 2017.

| | HoloViews | plotnine |
|---|---|---|
| Description | Complex and declarative visualizations from annotated data. | Grammar of graphics for Python, based on R's ggplot2. |
| GitHub stars | 2,915 | 4,780 |
| Commits (12 months) | 326 | 514 |
| Contributors | 151 | 105 |
| License | BSD-3-Clause | MIT |
| Language | Python | Python |
| Status | Active | Active |
| Install | `pip install holoviews` | `pip install plotnine` |

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