Recharts and Victory are both mature React charting libraries that wrap D3 functionality into declarative React components. Recharts has established itself as the most popular choice in the React ecosystem with over 24.8K GitHub stars, built with TypeScript and optimized for web performance. Victory, maintained by Nearform, offers nearly identical APIs for both React web and React Native, making it the only major charting library with true cross-platform support for mobile applications.
This comparison matters because choosing the wrong charting library can lead to performance bottlenecks, bundle size bloat, or architectural limitations discovered too late in development. Recharts targets teams building high-performance web dashboards who value TypeScript integration and rendering speed. Victory targets organizations building cross-platform applications where code sharing between web and mobile is essential, accepting some performance trade-offs for API consistency across platforms.
For most React web applications, Recharts is the superior choice. Its 2x performance advantage, native TypeScript support, smaller bundle size, and larger community make it the default recommendation for web dashboards, admin panels, and data-heavy SPAs. The performance difference isn't trivial—it compounds when rendering multiple charts or updating data frequently. If you're building exclusively for the web and performance matters, Recharts wins decisively.
However, Victory becomes the clear winner in one specific but important scenario: cross-platform applications sharing code between web and mobile. If you're building with React Native or planning mobile apps in your roadmap, Victory's unified API is invaluable—you write chart code once and deploy everywhere. The performance penalty is real but acceptable when weighed against maintaining two separate charting implementations. For web-only projects, the performance and TypeScript advantages of Recharts outweigh Victory's slightly gentler learning curve.