# How to draw candlesticks in your own app

A candlestick chart is ten lines of JavaScript. Which library you may ship it in is a licence question — attribution, seats, and free builds that expire.

*https://stockmarketstack.com/how-to/draw-candlesticks-in-your-own-app · next to JavaScript Charting Libraries for Finance*

**Answer:** Lightweight Charts draws candles in about ten lines under Apache-2.0, and KLineChart does the same with indicators attached. What decides this is the licence rather than the renderer: attribution you have to keep, seats counted per developer, free builds that are non-commercial only or expire, and libraries granted only to approved companies. Read the licence before the feature table.

## The tools that do this

*In the order this page recommends trying them. Paid placement does not affect this order.*

1. [Lightweight Charts](https://stockmarketstack.com/tools/lightweight-charts.md) — Apache-2.0 canvas renderer, six series types, no indicators. The NOTICE and a TradingView link follow the build into your product.
2. [KLineChart](https://stockmarketstack.com/tools/klinechart.md) — Apache-2.0 as well, with 27 indicators and 16 drawing overlays in the box. Its NOTICE credits TradingView too, so that attribution ships either way.
3. [amCharts 5 Stock Chart](https://stockmarketstack.com/tools/amcharts-stock-chart.md) — Linkware — every feature, in commercial products, provided the amCharts link on the chart stays. Removing it is $64 a year per developer seat.
4. [TradingView Advanced Charts](https://stockmarketstack.com/tools/tradingview-advanced-charts.md) — 100+ indicators at no charge, but only to companies shipping a free public product. You apply, and clause 7.5 prices a breach at $50,000.
5. [Highcharts Stock](https://stockmarketstack.com/tools/highcharts-stock.md) — 48 indicators, a navigator and a support contract, per developer seat — $732 a year for Core plus Stock on one public application.
6. [Apache ECharts](https://stockmarketstack.com/tools/echarts.md) — The general-purpose library your dashboard may already have. One candlestick series, no indicators, and a row ordered open, close, low, high.

## The short way

[Lightweight Charts](https://stockmarketstack.com/tools/lightweight-charts) puts candles on a page in about ten lines, with no
account and nothing to buy:

```js
import { createChart, CandlestickSeries } from 'lightweight-charts';

const chart = createChart(document.getElementById('container'));
const series = chart.addSeries(CandlestickSeries, {
  upColor: '#26a69a',
  downColor: '#ef5350',
  borderVisible: false,
});

series.setData([
  { time: '2018-12-22', open: 75.16, high: 82.84, low: 36.16, close: 45.72 },
  { time: '2018-12-23', open: 45.12, high: 53.90, low: 45.12, close: 48.09 },
]);

chart.timeScale().fitContent();
```

That is the whole contract: a container element, a series type, an array of OHLC objects keyed by
`time`. The library never fetches anything, so where those objects come from is your problem and
not its. Two things are already decided by those ten lines, and both are on the rest of this page —
you have no indicators, and you have an attribution obligation.

## What the options are

**A renderer and nothing above it.** [Lightweight Charts](https://stockmarketstack.com/tools/lightweight-charts) is Apache-2.0,
canvas, and six series types, with no indicators, no drawing tools, no symbol search and no
datafeed adapter. TradingView's own comparison page puts it at 35 KB; the 5.2.1 standalone
production bundle is 198 KB minified and about 62 KB gzipped, which is the number to budget
against. A trendline layer and a moving average are both yours to write on the plugin API.

**A renderer that already has the analysis layer.** [KLineChart](https://stockmarketstack.com/tools/klinechart) is the same
licence and roughly the same weight — 58 KB gzipped, zero runtime dependencies — and version 10.0.3
registers 27 technical indicators and 16 drawing overlays. Its NOTICE credits both KLineChart and
TradingView's Lightweight Charts, so shipping it means shipping a TradingView attribution even
though it is not a TradingView project.

**Everything, free, with a link on the chart.** [amCharts 5 Stock Chart](https://stockmarketstack.com/tools/amcharts-stock-chart)
is the unusual bargain in this category: 34 indicator modules, 19 drawing tools, a period and
series-type toolbar, and a LICENSE that permits all of it in a commercial product provided the
branding link stays. Paying is what removes the link — $64 a year per developer seat for a public
site with no login, $224 for anything behind one.

**Free, closed, and only if you qualify.** [TradingView Advanced Charts](https://stockmarketstack.com/tools/tradingview-advanced-charts)
has no fee clause at all and arrives with 100+ indicators and the interface most traders already
recognise. The eligibility test is the price: companies only, a publicly accessible implementation
offered free to its users, a mandatory non-`nofollow` attribution link and a published announcement
of the partnership. TradingView's public FAQ says it plainly — not for personal use, hobbies,
studies or testing.

**Paid per seat, with a support contract behind it.** [Highcharts Stock](https://stockmarketstack.com/tools/highcharts-stock)
ships 48 indicators, a navigator strip, a range selector and data grouping, at $732 a year per
developer for Core plus Stock on one public application. [AnyStock](https://stockmarketstack.com/tools/anystock) sells
per product and per registered domain from $139, with about 36 indicators and 18 drawing tools.
[SciChart.js](https://stockmarketstack.com/tools/scichart-js) is the WebGL and WebAssembly option at $1,349.66 a year per
developer, and ships no indicators at all — the ones in its demos are example source you copy.

**The library the rest of the dashboard already uses.** [Apache ECharts](https://stockmarketstack.com/tools/echarts) has a
`candlestick` series and no financial scaffolding around it; [Plotly.js](https://stockmarketstack.com/tools/plotly-js) has
`candlestick` and `ohlc` traces under MIT and is the same renderer that draws a notebook figure.
Both are the right answer when the price chart is one panel among twenty and one library for all of
them is worth more than the financial affordances you will hand-build. Neither is the right answer
when the chart is the product.

## Where this breaks

**Attribution follows the build, not the repository.** Apache-2.0 clause 4(d) requires a
redistributor to reproduce the attribution notices from the project's NOTICE file — in a NOTICE
file of your own, in your documentation, or wherever third-party notices normally appear in what
you generate. That obligation attaches to the thing you ship, not to your source tree, and it is
the part people discover after launch. Lightweight Charts adds a second half on top of the licence:
its documentation asks for the NOTICE text *and* a link to tradingview.com, and the
`attributionLogo` layout option, which defaults to `true`, is what satisfies the link half by
drawing it on the chart. Switch it off and you owe the link somewhere else.

**Free of charge and open source are different words.** Four libraries here are free and only two
of them are open:

- **amCharts** calls its own terms linkware. You may use it commercially, modify it and bundle it,
  provided you do not disable, hide or alter the branding link, and you ship the LICENSE file. You
  may not sell the software itself or distribute it other than as part of an application.
- **TradingView Advanced Charts** ships no source at all, and clause 2.5 bars the library from any
  public code repository and requires that your project is not open source. Clause 7.5 sets
  liquidated damages at $50,000 for each proven breach.
- **Highcharts** publishes its full source on GitHub and npm and is still proprietary: GitHub
  reports no recognised licence, there is no SPDX identifier to check, and the terms are the EULA.
- **SciChart's Community build** is non-commercial only, carries a watermark that can be moved but
  not hidden, sends telemetry that cannot be turned off, and is valid for six months from the
  *release* date of the version you shipped. Rebuilding does not reset the clock — you upgrade and
  redeploy, or the chart draws an error.

**A seat is per developer, and the deployment moves the price more than the tier does.** Highsoft's
Standard License Agreement defines a Developer as any unnamed person, employee or contractor, "who
will be simultaneously working with the API and/or the source code of the Licensed Software" — so
the number you are buying is concurrent developers, and a three-person team triples the figure. The
second axis is where the thing runs: on Highcharts, internal-only is $370 a year against $732 for
one public application and $2,198 for up to five. AnyStock counts differently again — per product,
per domain you register at purchase, with the $139 Website tier void the moment your site has a
login of any kind. SciChart's JavaScript SKUs issue runtime keys locked to domains you register by
hand, and the only route to an unlocked key is a cross-platform bundle that costs more than the
JavaScript product itself.

**Some of the free ones are free on application.** Advanced Charts is a form, an approval and then
an invitation to a private GitHub repository; AnyChart's non-commercial licence is granted by
request through a form rather than downloaded. Neither is a package manager away, and neither is a
decision you can make on a Friday afternoon.

**You still write the adapter.** Not one library on this page ships market data, a symbol, a
session or a holiday calendar, and the gap between "renders OHLC" and "renders a trading chart" is
most of the work:

- **The row order is not standard.** An ECharts `candlestick` item is `[open, close, lowest,
  highest]` rather than the open-high-low-close almost every feed returns, remapped through
  `encode: { y: [1, 4, 3, 2] }`.
- **Weekend gaps are the default on a real date axis.** Plotly.js leaves flat holes across
  Saturdays, holidays and the overnight session until you configure `rangebreaks`, and the holiday
  list is yours to maintain per exchange, forever. ECharts dodges it with a category axis of
  trading dates instead.
- **A volume pane is assembly, not a flag.** In ECharts it is a second grid with its own axis pair,
  a bar series pointed at it, `axisPointer.link` for a crosshair across both, and every `dataZoom`
  listing both axis indices. The project's own large-scale candlestick example spends 133 lines of
  option object on that, before a single indicator exists.
- **Live updates have their own API.** Appending a tick is `Plotly.extendTraces`,
  `series.update()`, or `updateData` depending on the library — and ECharts documents incremental
  rendering for scatter and lines but not for candlesticks, so a live chart there is `setOption`
  with the series again.

**A performance claim is about points on screen, not rows in memory.** SciChart advertises real-time
rendering of up to 100 million points at 60 FPS, with no published method behind it. Lightweight
Charts says "responsive even with thousands of bars" and publishes no figure at all; its opt-in data
conflation, added in 5.1.0 and off by default, is aimed at tens of thousands of points and up.
ECharts turns `large: true` on above 600 candles and its own documentation says that in that mode
the style of an individual data item can no longer be customised — a rendering optimisation that
silently takes a feature away. Plotly has no WebGL candlestick or OHLC trace at all, so a price
chart there is SVG at any size, one path per bar. The figure that matters is the one your data
produces on your page, and none of these numbers is it.

## If you outgrow this

**When the chart becomes the product**, the missing piece is almost always the indicator and
drawing layer rather than the renderer, and that is the moment the licence question gets expensive.
The three honest exits are paying per seat, qualifying for Advanced Charts, or accepting the
amCharts link — and the fourth, building the layer yourself on a plugin API, is the one people
underestimate. Everything in this catalogue that draws a chart inside your own code is in
[JavaScript charting libraries for finance](https://stockmarketstack.com/categories/charting-libraries), and the ones you can
read the source of are in [open source](https://stockmarketstack.com/collections/open-source).

**When the data behind it becomes the problem**, that is a separate shopping trip with none of the
same vendors. [Market data APIs](https://stockmarketstack.com/categories/market-data-apis) is the catalogue side of it,
[how to stream real-time stock quotes](https://stockmarketstack.com/how-to/stream-real-time-quotes) is the mechanics of getting
updates into the chart, and [why real-time stock data is so expensive](https://stockmarketstack.com/guides/real-time-market-data-fees)
is why putting a live quote on a public page costs more than everything on this page combined.

**When the series stops fitting in a request**, the chart is no longer the constraint. Where a year
of ticks lives, and what it costs to run, is [tick data storage](https://stockmarketstack.com/categories/tick-data-storage).

## FAQ

### What is the cheapest library I can legally ship inside a product I charge for?

Three of them cost nothing and permit it outright. Lightweight Charts and KLineChart are Apache-2.0, which allows commercial use and asks only that you carry the project's NOTICE attribution into whatever you distribute. amCharts 5 Stock Chart is not open source but its LICENSE permits commercial use on condition that the branding link drawn on the chart stays visible and the LICENSE file ships with your build. What is never free for a product you sell is a library described as free for non-commercial use — that phrase is the opposite of this answer, not a softer version of it.

### Does any charting library come with market data?

None of the ones on this page. Every library here renders arrays you hand it and makes no network request of its own, which means symbols, history, live updates, session handling and the exchange licences behind them are all a separate purchase. TradingView's own comparison draws the line explicitly — its libraries take your data through an API you implement, while its embeddable widgets are the hosted things that contain TradingView's data.

### Is "free for commercial use" the same thing as open source?

No, and the gap is where most of the surprises live. Open source means a licence like Apache-2.0 or MIT that lets you redistribute, fork and modify. Free-but-not-open covers amCharts, whose terms forbid removing the attribution or distributing the library on its own; TradingView Advanced Charts, which is granted only to companies and bars the library from any public repository; and SciChart's Community build, which is non-commercial only. All four are free of charge and only two of them are open source.

### How many candles can the library actually draw?

The honest answer is that the vendor's number and your number measure different things. A performance claim is about points rasterised on screen, usually in a synthetic loop, while what you have is rows in memory plus whatever your framework does around them. The renderer sets the shape of the answer — canvas and WebGL scale with pixels, SVG creates a DOM node per bar — but the figure you need is the one from your own data on your own page.

## Sources

1. [Lightweight Charts documentation](https://tradingview.github.io/lightweight-charts/docs) — TradingView, read 2026-09-21
2. [Free charting libraries — Advanced Charts, Trading Platform and Lightweight Charts](https://www.tradingview.com/free-charting-libraries/) — TradingView, read 2026-09-21
3. [Apache License, Version 2.0](https://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0) — Apache Software Foundation, 2004-01-01. Version 2.0 is the operative Apache licence and its text has not been revised since it was issued.
4. [amCharts 5 LICENSE file](https://raw.githubusercontent.com/amcharts/amcharts5/master/LICENSE) — amCharts, read 2026-09-21
5. [Highsoft Standard License Agreement 19.1](https://shop.highcharts.com/license) — Highsoft, read 2026-09-21

*Last updated 2026-09-21. A reference page, corrected in place — not a dated post.*