TradingView Lightweight Charts

What it is

A canvas renderer for financial series, and deliberately nothing more. Candlesticks, bars, lines, areas, baselines and histograms, with a time scale that behaves like a trading chart, a price scale, a crosshair, real-time updates and one runtime dependency. Apache-2.0, maintained by TradingView on GitHub, and the smallest of the vendor's three charting products by a long way.

The licence is the reason to start here. It is the only one of the three that carries no conditions on where your chart can live. There is no access request, no private repository, no attribution requirement in the LICENSE file, no clause about paywalls or internal dashboards, and no rule against committing it to a public repository. For a crypto product that is open source, or that sits behind a login, or whose brand guidelines say no third-party logos, that difference decides the question before any feature comparison starts.

What you are giving up is the technical-analysis workstation. The vendor's own comparison table marks the 100-plus indicator library, the 110-plus drawing tools, custom indicators and indicator templates as absent, and caps price scales at two where Advanced Charts offers eight. If your users want to draw a Fibonacci retracement, this is not the library. If they want to look at a price, it is.

It is alive, at a visible rate. Commits on master on 18 September 2026; lightweight-charts@5.2.1 published to npm on 12 August 2026, after 5.2.0 in April and 5.1.0 in December 2025; and on 16 September 2026 the vendor cut 1.0.0 releases of six first-party plugin packages under the @tradingview/lwc-* namespace — a toolkit plus stacked-area, stacked-bars, rounded-candles, pretty-histogram and vertical-line plugins. The repository is not archived.

Pricing

Free, and there is nothing else on sale. The LICENSE file on the default branch is the stock Apache License 2.0 in full — 201 lines, no added clause, closing with the standard appendix and "Copyright 2023 TradingView, Inc." The npm manifest agrees, and so does the vendor's own library comparison table, which prints "Apache 2.0" and marks open source yes, against "Proprietary" and no for the other two libraries.

The attribution request is real, and it is not in the LICENSE file. The README states that the licence requires specifying TradingView as the product creator, and asks you to add the NOTICE file's attribution text plus a link to the vendor's site on a page your users can reach. It points at the attributionLogo layout option as a way to satisfy the link requirement on the chart itself. The NOTICE file itself is two lines: the product name and a copyright line.

Worth being precise about, because this is where the reviews get it wrong in both directions. Apache-2.0 §4(d) does require you to carry forward a NOTICE file's contents when you redistribute the work. It does not, on its face, require a visible logo in a running application. What the vendor has done is put the request in the README and ship a chart option that makes honouring it a one-line change. That is a much weaker constraint than Advanced Charts' free-with-visible-attribution licence, and it is not the same as no constraint at all.

Integrations

Install from npm as lightweight-charts, or take the standalone IIFE build from a CDN, which creates a LightweightCharts global. Four published builds — ESM and standalone, production and development — and one runtime dependency, fancy-canvas. The package also includes parts of Microsoft's tslib under the BSD Zero Clause License, which the README records.

Extension is by plugin, not by configuration. The library exposes custom series types and drawing primitives, there is a published plugin catalogue and a set of interactive examples, and a create-lwc-plugin wizard scaffolds a new one. The six first-party plugin packages released in September 2026 are the vendor's own use of that surface.

Mobile wrappers exist under separate repositories — lightweight-charts-android and LightweightChartsIOS, both maintained by the same organisation, both at 5.2.0 as of mid-June 2026. Note the iOS repository's name: searching for lightweight-charts-ios returns nothing, which is enough to make a careless check conclude the iOS wrapper was abandoned.

The repository ships two Agent Skills for AI coding assistants, one for using the library and one for authoring plugins, installable with the skills CLI. The vendor's stated reason is that assistants otherwise work from v4-era snippets. That is a fair warning about this library in particular: the v5 API replaced addCandlestickSeries-style methods with a generic addSeries(SeriesType, …), so model-generated code for it is frequently a version behind.

Limitations

No indicators, no drawing tools, no watchlist, no news, no trading UI. All marked absent in the vendor's own table. Two price scales, not eight. This is the whole trade and everything else on this card follows from it.

The 35 KB on the marketing page is not the size you get. Measured on 19 September 2026 from the published v5.2.1 files: the standalone production build is 197,827 bytes raw and 62,038 bytes gzipped, and the non-standalone production build is 189,213 raw and 60,294 gzipped. Roughly 60 KB over the wire rather than 35 — still small for a financial chart, and still an order of magnitude under Advanced Charts' stated 670 KB, but the advertised figure is stale and the vendor's own comparison table repeats it.

The mobile wrappers run months behind the web library. The JavaScript package shipped 5.0.0 on 2 January 2025. Both the Android and iOS wrappers stayed on 4.0.0 — released in September 2023 — until 9 June 2026. If a v5 feature is load-bearing for your mobile app, check the wrapper's release feed rather than the library's.

It ships no data, and no data adapter either. Unlike Advanced Charts, which at least defines a Datafeed API and bundles a UDF adapter, this library takes an array of points and nothing else. Fetching, normalising, gap-filling and streaming a crypto series are entirely yours — which in practice means a card from the market data category has to be answered first.

The attribution question is a judgement call, not a checkbox. The request sits in a README and a NOTICE file rather than in the licence text, and the two documents do not say the same thing. If your company's answer to "must we display this logo" needs to be defensible, that is a conversation with counsel about Apache-2.0 §4(d) and not something this card can settle.

Alternatives

TradingView Advanced Charts is the same vendor's answer when a price chart is not enough — the indicator engine, the drawing tools, the dialogs — at 670 KB, behind an access request, and under a licence that wants its attribution visible and your product out from behind a paywall.

If you need the indicators but the licence conditions rule Advanced Charts out, the comparison moves to the commercial financial charting libraries, which sell a licence instead of granting one; read whichever of those this catalogue has in charting platforms and libraries.

And if you are not building anything and simply want the chart, that is TradingView, the subscription product this library is named after.