SciChart.js

What it is

SciChart.js renders through a WebAssembly engine with WebGL acceleration rather than through the DOM or a 2D canvas context, which is the reason to consider it and the reason it is heavy. The vendor claims real-time rendering of up to 100 million points at 60 FPS; that is a marketing figure with no published method behind it, and nobody has run it here.

For finance it gives you the primitives — FastCandlestickRenderableSeries, FastOhlcRenderableSeries, an OhlcDataSeries, multi-pane surfaces with synchronised zoom and cursors, and an annotations API covering lines, boxes, text, axis markers and arbitrary SVG. What it does not give you is a single technical indicator or a single financial drawing tool. The published 5.2.69 package has no MACD, no RSI, no Bollinger Bands, no Stochastic, no Ichimoku, no Fibonacci and no pitchfork anywhere in its 1,484 files; the trading drawing tools and indicator panels in the demos are example source you copy into your own project.

Version 5.2.69 went to npm on 8 September 2026, with a 6.0.0 alpha publishing almost daily alongside it.

Pricing

Per developer, billed upfront, in US dollars. The store is a tab per platform — Product Bundles first and marked "best value", then JavaScript, WPF, iOS, macOS and Android as individual products — and inside each tab the price is shown per month against a term selector that defaults to three years. So the first number you see is the cheapest one on offer, not what a year costs.

On the JavaScript tab: SciChart.js 2D is $1,349.66 per developer for a one-year term, shown as $84.35 a month over two years and $67.48 over three; the mechanism is a 50% discount on the second year and a further 10% off a three-year total. Adding 3D takes the one-year rate to $1,765.26, $110.33 a month over two years and $88.26 over three. A 90-day money-back guarantee and a 50%-off small-business discount, conditions attached, sit above the table on every tab.

Standard Licensing — what the JS-only products carry — covers up to five websites or applications and up to 15,000 end users per licence, with runtime keys locked to domains you register in your account. Advanced Licensing, which is what you need for non-domain-locked keys, OEM distribution, more than five projects or more than 15,000 users, is sold only with the cross-platform Bundles: $194.73 a month for 2D Pro on a one-year term, $146.04 over two years and $116.84 over three, with 2D/3D Pro at $289.97 / $217.48 / $173.98 and 2D/3D Source at $385.21 / $288.91 / $231.13. The bundles are also the only tier that carries the library source code, and they double the support allowance from five to ten.

Two things in that table are worth knowing before you pick a tier. The free Community build lists all 3D charts, which the paid SciChart.js 2D licence does not — starting to pay for the cheapest commercial tier takes chart types away. And every JavaScript product, free or paid, is marked not Advanced Licensing ready and not cleared for non-domain-locked web apps, so if your product ships to customers' own domains, the JS-only SKUs are not the ones you want however attractive the price is.

The Community Edition has been the default since version 3.2 — npm install scichart needs no key and starts up free, and the bundle says so out loud: "Defaulting to SciChart Community Edition." It is non-commercial only, watermarked at the bottom left, telemetered, unsupported, and valid for six months from the release date of the version you shipped, after which the chart draws an error instead.

Data & coverage

None. SciChart.js draws arrays and knows nothing about symbols, sessions or exchanges. It is a general scientific and financial renderer that happens to have candlesticks; a market-data feed is entirely separate.

Integrations

scichart on npm with no runtime dependencies, plus a jsDelivr build for a plain script tag. The first-party React wrapper is scichart-react, MIT-licensed, still on 1.0.0 from August 2025 — a year behind the library it wraps, with a 2.0.0 alpha published in September 2026 and no stable release behind it yet. The WebAssembly binaries load as separate files, which means a bundler config step — scichart2d.wasm alone is 1.28 MB, with scichart2d.js at 162 KB and the JavaScript entry point at 247 KB. SciChart also sells iOS, Android, macOS, WPF and Avalonia libraries; licences are per product and are not interchangeable.

Limitations

• No indicators and no financial drawing tools in the library. For a product marketed at trading platforms this is the single most expensive thing to discover late.
• Domain-locked runtime keys. Every production hostname is registered by hand in your account, and a key is regenerated after each change. Electron, on-premises installs and customer subdomains all push you to Advanced Licensing, which is Bundle-only.
• The cheapest way to an unlocked key costs more than the JS product itself. The 2D Pro bundle is $2,336.76 per developer for a one-year term, against $1,349.66 for SciChart.js 2D on its own — and the bundle is the only route to a key that is not locked to domains you register.
• The free build expires. Six months from the release date of the version you shipped, then an on-chart error. Fine for a hobby project you keep current; a trap for anything you deploy and forget.
• Telemetry cannot be disabled on the free build, and the deployment URL is part of what is sent. An air-gapped licence exists and is a sales conversation.
• The pricing page is hostile to inspection. It sits behind a bot check, the headline number is the three-year rate, and the store labels its own figures "representative pricing".

Alternatives

Highcharts Stock costs a fraction as much per seat and ships 48 indicators, at the price of SVG rendering rather than WebGL. TradingView Advanced Charts is free and arrives with indicators and drawing tools, if you are a company shipping something free to its users. KLineChart is Apache-2.0 with 27 indicators and no licence to manage. Lightweight Charts is the small free canvas option, with neither indicators nor a WebGL engine.