DXcharts Lite

What it is

The rendering core of a commercial broker charting product, published on its own under MPL-2.0. Devexperts builds trading platforms for brokers; DXcharts is the chart inside them, and DXcharts Lite is the part of it you can npm install without talking to anyone.

What "Lite" means is legible from the source tree rather than the marketing page. Version 2.7.36 draws nine series types — candle, line, area, bar, scatter plot, trend, hollow candle, histogram and baseline — across panes, with an x and y axis, volumes, a crosshair, hit testing, pan and zoom, resizable panes, a watermark and a snapshot API. It contains no indicator engine and no drawing tools. Grep the whole src tree for "indicator" and one file matches, a difference-cloud drawer.

Liveness, in dates. Version 2.7.36 was released on 2 September 2026 and published to npm the same day; 2.7.35 on 20 August, 2.7.34 on 14 August, 2.7.33 on 8 July. The last commit on master was 2 September 2026. Nine issues and three pull requests are open and the repository is not archived. Releases arrive roughly fortnightly, which is a maintained-library cadence rather than a weekend-project one.

Pricing

Lite is free, MPL-2.0, installed from npm, with no key, no account and nothing to upgrade to inside the package.

The other half of the open core has a published price, and it is worth knowing before you commit to Lite. Devexperts sells the full DXcharts in three shapes — a Basic plan from $499 a month with "essential technical indicators", basic trading from the chart and web only; an Enterprise plan at custom pricing with a white-labelled library, deeper customisation and advanced trading from the chart; and a lifetime licence as a one-off payment whose figure is not published. Both priced plans advertise a one-month free trial, and the route in is a form answered "within one business day". Those numbers belong to that product, not to this one, and the paid plans are not a tier of Lite — they are a different build.

Data & coverage

No data, no transport, no venue list. Lite takes an array of candles you supply and draws them. There is no quote-feed interface to conform to and no streaming client in the package; you push updates in. Devexperts' own FAQ for the commercial product puts it as "DXcharts is built to be data-agnostic", and that is true of Lite by construction because there is nothing else in it.

Nothing is crypto-specific. There are also no session or market-hours rules to switch off, which makes a 24/7 market the easy case rather than the awkward one.

Integrations

TypeScript throughout, ESM and UMD builds, and three runtime dependencies — rxjs, date-fns and color. Those matter: they are why the shipped bundle is what it is, and rxjs in particular is a version you will be negotiating with if your app already carries one.

Limitations

The README is stale about the library it documents. Its version badge reads 2.2.0, its example package.json pins 1.0.0, and its CDN snippets pin 2.0.1, while npm's latest is 2.7.36. The knowledge-base URL its contribution badge points at returns 404. The releases feed is the thing to trust here, not the front page of the repository.

102 KB gzipped for a chart with no indicators in it. The minified bundle of 2.7.36 is 371 KB raw and 102 KB gzipped — measured, not quoted. That is roughly twice the free alternatives in this category, and those ship two dozen indicators and a set of drawing tools inside the same number. The dependencies explain most of it, and tree-shaking the ESM build will recover some, but the starting point is not small.

No indicators and no drawing tools, at any price, inside Lite. This is the open-core boundary and it is drawn exactly where the commercial product's feature list starts. If your users expect RSI on a second pane and a trendline they can drag, Lite is the beginning of that work rather than a shortcut through it.

MPL-2.0 is file-level copyleft, and this is a library you will be patching. Rendering engines get modified — a tick formatter, a locale, a hit-test radius. Changes inside the library's own files carry a publication obligation that Apache-2.0 and MIT do not. It is a manageable obligation and it is not the one your lawyer will assume from the word "open source".

No documentation site. There is a generated configuration reference and a README in the repository, and that is the whole of it.

Alternatives

KLineChart is the closest free comparison and a different set of trade-offs — Apache-2.0 instead of MPL-2.0, no dependencies, roughly half the bundle, and 27 indicators and 16 drawing tools already in the box. Lightweight Charts is smaller still and does less. The honest argument for Lite is the one nobody advertises: it is the engine underneath a product brokers already run, so the rendering has been worn in against real order flow, and if you later need the indicator suite there is a vendor to buy it from rather than a fork to maintain.