# Charting Libraries for Crypto Products

The engine that draws the candles inside an exchange, wallet or dashboard you ship — chosen by licence, real bundle size and what it leaves you to build.

*https://cryptomarkets.tools/categories/charting-libraries*

## What this category is

The chart inside somebody else's product. Every card here is a dependency a developer installs so
that an exchange front end, a wallet, a DEX aggregator or an analytics dashboard has candles in it,
and none of them is a screen you open to read the market. If that is what you came for, the
products are in [charting platforms and screeners](https://cryptomarkets.tools/categories/charting-platforms), and the screen
you can also trade from is a [trading terminal](https://cryptomarkets.tools/categories/trading-terminals).

Two facts frame everything below. **No library here ships a single price** — every candle is
yours to source, so the [market data APIs](https://cryptomarkets.tools/categories/market-data-apis) decision comes first and
follows you into whichever engine you pick. And **the licence rules products out before the feature
list does**: seven cards, six different deals, and the free ones are not free on the same terms.

Where to start, by what the product needs:

- **A price chart and no licence conversation** —
  [TradingView Lightweight Charts](https://cryptomarkets.tools/tools/tradingview-lightweight-charts). Apache-2.0, one runtime
  dependency, no indicators and no drawing tools.
- **Indicators and drawing tools in the box, still Apache-2.0** —
  [KLineChart](https://cryptomarkets.tools/tools/klinechart). Twenty-seven indicators, sixteen drawing overlays, zero
  dependencies, one maintainer.
- **A full technical-analysis workstation, in a product that is public and free to its users** —
  [TradingView Advanced Charts](https://cryptomarkets.tools/tools/tradingview-advanced-charts). Free while the attribution
  stays visible and nothing sits behind a paywall.
- **A price list procurement can read** — [Highcharts Stock](https://cryptomarkets.tools/tools/highcharts-stock), bought per
  developer seat with a card.
- **A broker-grade front end with a vendor behind it** — [DXcharts](https://cryptomarkets.tools/tools/dxcharts) from $499 a
  month, or [ChartIQ](https://cryptomarkets.tools/tools/chartiq) at a price you will only learn from an account manager.
- **The engine underneath a commercial product, to audit before talking to sales** —
  [DXcharts Lite](https://cryptomarkets.tools/tools/dxcharts-lite), MPL-2.0.

## The licence decides before the features do

Read it out of the LICENSE file, not the marketing page, because "free" covers several different
deals here and the difference decides whether you can ship.

**Permissive open source.** [KLineChart](https://cryptomarkets.tools/tools/klinechart) and
[Lightweight Charts](https://cryptomarkets.tools/tools/tradingview-lightweight-charts) are Apache-2.0. There is a wrinkle on
the second: its README asks for TradingView's NOTICE text and a link on a page your users can
reach, and ships an `attributionLogo` option to satisfy it — a request that sits in the README and
the NOTICE file rather than the LICENSE, and is a conversation with counsel if your answer has to
be defensible.

**File-level copyleft.** [DXcharts Lite](https://cryptomarkets.tools/tools/dxcharts-lite) is MPL-2.0. You may ship it inside a
closed product, but changes to the library's own files must be published under the same licence —
and a rendering engine is exactly the kind of dependency that gets patched for a tick formatter or a
hit-test radius.

**Free and proprietary.** [Advanced Charts](https://cryptomarkets.tools/tools/tradingview-advanced-charts) is granted on
application from a private GitHub repository, free while the TradingView attribution stays visible
and the implementation is public, which the vendor defines as not for private use and not behind a
paywall. The terms also forbid any part of it in a public repository, so an open-source front end
cannot vendor the files and every contributor needs their own grant.
[The two TradingView libraries side by side](https://cryptomarkets.tools/compare/tradingview-charting-libraries) is the page
for choosing between them.

**A licence that is a document.** [Highcharts Stock](https://cryptomarkets.tools/tools/highcharts-stock) has no key and no
activation; the per-seat agreement is the control. Its no-charge licence excludes work for an
employer or a client by name, so a crypto product buys seats — and an annual seat means you must
stop using the software, releases already shipped included, when the subscription ends.

**A licence that is enforced in code.** [ChartIQ](https://cryptomarkets.tools/tools/chartiq) ships with a keyfile that locks a
production package to registered domains, IP addresses or file systems, with an expiry that
defaults to one year and iframe hosting blocked until the vendor unlocks it. A preview environment
on a new domain is an infrastructure conversation before it is a deploy.

**A licence by plan.** [DXcharts](https://cryptomarkets.tools/tools/dxcharts) sells a monthly Basic plan, an Enterprise plan
that can extend to full product ownership and IP rights, and a lifetime licence that keeps working
after its single included year of updates ends. Each one is agreed through a form rather than a
checkout, and none of them is a tier of Lite — they are a different build.

## The bundle size on the vendor's page is out of date

Three of the seven have been measured from their published files, and all three are heavier than
the number their own pages print:

- **Lightweight Charts 5.2.1** — about 62 KB gzipped standalone and 60 KB non-standalone, against the
  35 KB on the landing page and in the vendor's comparison table.
- **KLineChart 10.0.3** — 58 KB gzipped, against "only 40k" in the README.
- **DXcharts Lite 2.7.36** — 102 KB gzipped, with no indicator engine in it; the three runtime
  dependencies, `rxjs` among them, account for most of it.

**Advanced Charts** is stated by its vendor at 670 KB, and it is not bundled at all: the package is
copied into a static-asset directory by a `postinstall` step, because your bundler will not process
it. ChartIQ, DXcharts and Highcharts Stock carry no measured figure on their cards. Size
matters less on a trading screen than on a wallet page that happens to show a sparkline, which is
where the renderers earn their place.

## Candles, depth and the series crypto actually needs

**Every library here draws a candle.** What separates them is everything else. Lightweight Charts
draws candlesticks, bars, lines, areas, baselines and histograms on up to two price scales.
DXcharts Lite draws nine series types, hollow candles and a scatter plot among them. KLineChart has
six candle rendering modes. The commercial three add the drawing palette and the study library:
ChartIQ's 48 drawing tool classes and 124 built-in studies, Advanced Charts' roughly 110 drawing
tools and 100-plus indicators on up to eight price scales, DXcharts' 100-plus indicators and
40-plus drawing tools, Highcharts Stock's 43 indicator modules with a navigator and range selector.

**One library draws the book.** ChartIQ's Active Trader module carries a market-depth renderer and
an order-book component. TradingView's depth of market, order ticket and position tracking belong
to its Trading Platform tier, not to Advanced Charts, so an exchange front end that assumed the
order ticket came with the chart should check the vendor's comparison table before scoping the
work. Highcharts Stock has no depth or order-book renderer, and no other card here records one.

**None of the seven is crypto-native.** No card records a funding-rate or open-interest series type
or a liquidation overlay built in. What differs is how cheaply you add one: in KLineChart a funding
pane is an indicator registration rather than a fork, and Lightweight Charts takes custom series
and drawing primitives through a plugin API with a scaffolding wizard. The 24/7 market is the easy
case almost everywhere — ChartIQ runs round the clock unless you assign market hours, and
KLineChart and DXcharts Lite have no session rules to switch off. DXcharts' own demo build anchors
crypto's daily bar at midnight rather than at a session open, which is evidence from the product
rather than from any documentation.

## Bring your own feed, and the interface you will write to

All seven are data-agnostic by construction, but they ask for the data in different shapes, and the
adapter is code you own:

- **A datafeed interface** — Advanced Charts defines a Datafeed API and bundles a UDF-compatible
  adapter you may edit; ChartIQ takes a static array, a pull `quotefeed` you implement, or pushed
  streaming updates.
- **Callbacks** — KLineChart's `setDataLoader` wants `getBars` for history and `subscribeBar` for
  the live tail.
- **An array of points** — Lightweight Charts and DXcharts Lite take the data you hand them and
  nothing else; fetching, gap-filling and streaming are yours.
- **Any format** — Highcharts Stock accepts CSV or JSON or live updates; its one data product is a
  set of Morningstar connectors that need your own Morningstar subscription.

Two vendors sell data next door, and in both cases it is a separate purchase: Devexperts offers
dxFeed beside DXcharts under a different brand and sales process, and Highcharts the Morningstar wiring
above. Whatever you feed in, a candle is an aggregation before it is a picture — the
[OHLCV](https://cryptomarkets.tools/glossary/ohlcv) entry covers why two sources disagree about the same bar.

## Wrappers, mobile and how the files reach your build

**Framework wrappers** exist on three cards: Highcharts Stock for React, Angular and Vue; DXcharts
with a React wrapper and published compatibility for React 19, Angular 19 and Vue 3; ChartIQ with
official React components and a React Native package. The other four cards record no first-party
wrapper, so the chart is mounted into a DOM node by hand.

**Installation is not npm everywhere.** Lightweight Charts, KLineChart, DXcharts Lite and Highcharts
are ordinary npm installs. Advanced Charts is a git dependency from a private repository, so your CI
needs a deploy key before it can build. DXcharts comes from a private registry for customers, with a
zip route for those without access. ChartIQ arrives as a licensed archive — and the public npm
package named `chartiq` is a 638-byte README that installs cleanly and does nothing.

**Mobile is a wrapper, and wrappers lag.** Lightweight Charts' iOS and Android wrappers stayed on
4.0.0 for seventeen months after the web library shipped 5.0.0. DXcharts' own description of its
mobile library is a chart canvas in an embedded browser, and its Basic plan is web only. ChartIQ
documents iOS and Android paths through webview containers.

## Open source against a sales call

**What the money buys is the furniture.** The free renderers give you a chart and leave the
crosshair dialogs, the drawing palette, the indicator suite and the saved layouts as work; the
commercial toolkits arrive with them. On Highcharts' own published rates that work costs $370 to
$1,678 per developer seat depending on whether the chart is internal or public and annual or
perpetual — and a chart your customers can see is external use by the shop's own definition, which
for a crypto product settles the question.

**Only one of the three paid toolkits can be bought this afternoon.** Highcharts Stock prices every
SKU and takes a card. DXcharts publishes one number, a $499-a-month floor on its Basic plan, and
routes every plan, that one included, through a form; its trial agreement is written for companies
and allows up to fourteen days of the advertised month for delivery. ChartIQ publishes nothing at
all, and its marketing site now redirects into an S&P Global page that returns 403. Three of the
seven cards carry a tier with no number on it, a pattern that runs through the whole catalogue in
[tools you cannot buy without a sales call](https://cryptomarkets.tools/collections/priced-on-request).

**Two vendors sell both halves, and the free half is the audit.** DXcharts Lite is the rendering
core of DXcharts with the paid modules removed; Lightweight Charts and Advanced Charts are
TradingView's open renderer and its granted workstation. Starting on the free half tells you in an
afternoon whether the engine suits your app, and moving up means buying from the same vendor rather
than maintaining a fork. The reverse risk sits with the independents: KLineChart is one maintainer
with a sponsorship page, and its ready-made UI, KLineChart Pro, has not been published since March
2023. The open-licence half of this page also appears in [open-source tools](https://cryptomarkets.tools/collections/open-source).

## What is not here

General-purpose plotting libraries, which will draw a candle and then leave you to write the
crosshair, the time axis and the price scale — accepting them would let this category take
anything that draws a line. Hosted chart widgets you embed by script tag from somebody else's site.
And the chart a trader opens rather than the one a developer ships, which is
[the category next door](https://cryptomarkets.tools/categories/charting-platforms).

## What this category looks like

Counted across the 7 cards below, not quoted from anyone.

- **Free tier:** 4 of 7
- **Cheapest paid month:** median $499, across $499 — from the 1 card that publish a monthly price
- **Has a "call us" tier:** 3 of 7
- **Publishes no tiers at all:** 3 of 7
- **Open source:** 3 of 7
- **Runs on your own machine:** 7 of 7

## Cards

- [ChartIQ](https://cryptomarkets.tools/tools/chartiq.md) — Heavyweight broker charting SDK, domain-locked, priced by an account manager.
- [DXcharts Lite](https://cryptomarkets.tools/tools/dxcharts-lite.md) — The MPL-2.0 renderer under a broker charting product — candles and axes, no indicators.
- [DXcharts](https://cryptomarkets.tools/tools/dxcharts.md) — The paid half of the open core — 100+ indicators, 40+ drawing tools, from $499 a month.
- [Highcharts Stock](https://cryptomarkets.tools/tools/highcharts-stock.md) — Per-seat commercial charting whose free licence excludes anything you sell.
- [KLineChart](https://cryptomarkets.tools/tools/klinechart.md) — Zero-dependency candle engine with no market-hours rules to switch off for 24/7.
- [TradingView Advanced Charts](https://cryptomarkets.tools/tools/tradingview-advanced-charts.md) — The chart engine inside half this market — free with visible attribution, not open source.
- [TradingView Lightweight Charts](https://cryptomarkets.tools/tools/tradingview-lightweight-charts.md) — Apache-2.0 canvas renderer for candles and lines. No indicators, no drawing tools.

## FAQ

### Which free charting library can I put inside a paid crypto product?

Lightweight Charts and KLineChart, both Apache-2.0, and DXcharts Lite under MPL-2.0, which also allows a closed product but makes your edits to its own files public. Not TradingView Advanced Charts on its free terms, which exclude a product behind a paywall or in private use, and not Highcharts Stock's no-charge licence, which covers personal, non-commercial use only.

### How big are these libraries really?

Larger than their own pages say. Measured on the published builds in September 2026, Lightweight Charts is about 60 KB gzipped against an advertised 35 KB, KLineChart 58 KB against 40 KB, and DXcharts Lite 102 KB with no indicators in it. TradingView states 670 KB for Advanced Charts. The three commercial toolkits carry no size figure on their cards.

### Do any of these libraries come with crypto market data?

None of the seven. Each takes candles you supply — through a datafeed interface, a data loader or a plain array — and coverage, history depth and behaviour during an exchange outage are properties of the feed you wire in. Choose the feed in the market-data category first; it decides more than the library does.

### Which one can draw an order book or depth chart?

ChartIQ, through its Active Trader module, which carries a market-depth renderer and an order-book component; it is a generic depth component rather than a crypto-native one. TradingView's depth of market and order ticket belong to its Trading Platform tier, not to Advanced Charts. Highcharts Stock has none, and no other card here records one.

### Is there a React or Vue wrapper?

Highcharts Stock ships wrappers for React, Angular and Vue. DXcharts documents a React wrapper and publishes compatibility with React 19, Angular 19 and Vue 3. ChartIQ has official React components and a React Native package. The cards for the other four record no first-party framework wrapper, so you mount the chart into a DOM node yourself.

### Why are these not under charting platforms?

Because the buyer is a different person. A charting platform is a screen a trader opens; a library is a dependency a developer ships, chosen by a licence file and a bundle size rather than by a screener or an alert. The two lists share no shortlist, so they were split on 7 October 2026.