Plotly
Founded 2013 · 101 employees on LinkedIn · 4 known investors
Plotly develops open-source data visualization libraries and analytics platforms—including its Plotly graphing library and Dash app framework—for analysts, engineers, and data scientists building interactive charts, dashboards, and data apps. It also offers AI-native and enterprise products for deploying and managing these apps in the cloud or self-hosted behind a firewall.
Also known as Plotly Technologies · Plotly, Inc.
Founders & leadership
Plotly was founded in 2013 by Alex Johnson.
Investors · 4
Company profile
researched Aug 2026Plotly is a technical computing company headquartered in Montreal, Quebec, that develops data visualization and analytics tools for analysts, engineers, scientists and data scientists. Its foundation is a set of MIT-licensed open-source libraries: Plotly.js for JavaScript, Plotly.py for Python, and related bindings for R, MATLAB, Julia, Node.js, Arduino, Perl and a REST API. The graphing libraries support 70+ browser-based, interactive chart types spanning basic, statistical, scientific, financial, AI/ML, geospatial and 3D visualizations, with publication-quality output and SVG/PNG export. Dash, the company's open-source framework for Python (and R and Julia), is used to build analytical web applications and dashboards and is reported at over 9 million monthly downloads; specialized libraries such as Dash DAQ (data-acquisition GUIs) and Dash Bio (bioinformatics components) extend it to domain use cases.
Commercial products layer deployment, management and collaboration on top of the open-source stack. Dash Enterprise is a self-hosted, Kubernetes-based platform for building, testing, deploying, managing and scaling Dash and Studio apps behind a customer's firewall, with Enterprise Extensions beyond open source. Plotly Cloud is a SaaS platform for publishing and sharing Dash and Plotly Studio apps, with built-in authentication and drag-and-drop or CLI deployment. Plotly Studio is a desktop, AI-native ("agentic analytics") application that generates Plotly graphs and Dash apps from data while exposing the underlying code and specifications. Historical products include Chart Studio Cloud, a free point-and-click online graphing tool, and Chart Studio Enterprise, its paid team edition, plus figure converters for matplotlib, ggplot2 and IGOR Pro.
Founding story
Plotly was founded in Montreal, Quebec, by Alex Johnson, Jack Parmer, Chris Parmer and Matthew Sundquist, whose backgrounds were in science, energy, and data analysis and visualization. Wikipedia dates the founding to 2012. Early employees included Canadian software engineer Christophe Viau and Canadian geophysicist Ben Postlethwaite. The company was premised on the idea that data should be interactive and accessible rather than confined to spreadsheets or static dashboards, which led to the release of the Plotly.js, Plotly.py and Dash open-source libraries.
Business model
Plotly operates an open-core model: the Plotly.js, Plotly.py and Dash libraries are released under the MIT license and distributed free through package managers such as pip and conda, while paid platform products — Dash Enterprise (self-hosted) and Plotly Cloud plus Plotly Studio (SaaS/desktop) — provide deployment, authentication, governance and management for data applications. The company also offers consulting, dashboard development, application integration and feature additions.
Revenue comes from commercial platform products layered on the free open-source libraries: Dash Enterprise licensing for self-hosted deployments behind a customer's firewall, and subscription pricing for Plotly Studio and Plotly Cloud (both have published pricing pages). Paid engagements for consulting, dashboard development, application integration and feature additions are also offered.
Traction
Dash is reported at over 9 million monthly downloads; the open-source tools collectively have been downloaded over a billion times. The plotly.py GitHub repository shows about 18.8k stars, 2.8k forks and 8,852 commits. Enterprise adoption is evidenced by case studies with Johnson Matthey, Somerset NHS Foundation Trust, S&P Global, CIBC and Intuit, and by descriptions of Dash Enterprise use at global banks, utilities and national labs.
Latest developments
The company has expanded from open source and Dash Enterprise into AI-oriented products: Plotly Studio, an AI-native desktop application for agentic analytics that generates Plotly graphs and Dash apps backed by verifiable code, and Plotly Cloud, a SaaS platform for publishing and managing Dash and Studio apps with built-in authentication and drag-and-drop or CLI deployment. Recent releases listed in the company changelog include Plotly 6.8.0 (optional font parameter for make_subplots), Dash 4.4.0 (support for hoveranywhere and clickanywhere events in dcc.Graph), Plotly.js 3.7.0 (sendDataToCloud modebar button uploads charts to Plotly Cloud), and Dash Enterprise 6.2.0 (reduced resource usage, reliability and security improvements). The company also promotes an embeddable AI offering and documented setup of Dash with coding agents.
▸Full profile — market position, technology, go-to-market, geography, history, risks & controversies
Market position
Plotly's open-source projects are described as among the most popular visualization projects on GitHub, with over a billion cumulative downloads and daily use by data scientists, engineers and analysts at Fortune 500 companies, research labs and universities; the plotly.py repository has approximately 18,800 GitHub stars and 2,800 forks. The libraries have had stable APIs for over a decade, and the company describes more than 10 years building data visualization tools used by millions of data scientists and analysts. Data journalism produced with Plotly has appeared in The Boston Globe and Washington Post newsrooms.
Plotly combines widely adopted, permissively licensed open-source graphing and app libraries with commercial platforms that deploy those same apps either as SaaS or fully self-hosted so no data leaves a customer's network. Dash lets Python-centric teams build customized analytical and scientific applications without separate front-end and back-end engineering, and its stateless server design supports multiple back-end languages. Plotly Studio's agentic analytics outputs verifiable code and specifications rather than opaque results, and the company positions its libraries as working well with coding agents. Long-standing stable APIs, exhaustive documentation, 70+ chart types, and enterprise controls such as SOC 2 and SSO/SAML are further stated points of difference.
Technology
The stack centers on Plotly.js, an open-source JavaScript graphing library built with D3/WebGL techniques that powers the Python (plotly.py), R, MATLAB, Node.js, Julia and Arduino interfaces and a REST API. plotly.py is a high-level declarative charting library whose figures render in Jupyter and other notebooks, as standalone HTML, or inside Dash applications; static image export uses the Kaleido package with Chrome/Chromium. Dash is a Python framework built on React with a lightweight, stateless server side, allowing multiple back-end languages; D3.js charts can be integrated as Dash components. Python connectors exist for Snowflake, Databricks, BigQuery and Postgres, and Dash and Studio can render anything reachable from Python including pandas, Polars, SQLAlchemy and Arrow. Dash Enterprise is an on-premises Kubernetes platform; Plotly Cloud and Dash Enterprise support SOC 2 and SSO/SAML.
Go-to-market
Adoption begins with freely distributed, MIT-licensed open-source libraries and extensive documentation, tutorials and code galleries on plotly.com, supported by a community forum and GitHub. Commercial conversion runs through demo requests, published pricing for Studio, Cloud and Dash Enterprise, direct enterprise sales, and customer case studies. The company also cultivates developer-community presence, having been featured at PyCon 2013 and sponsoring SciPy 2018, and positions its open source as working well with coding agents such as Claude and Codex.
Data analysts, engineers, scientists and data scientists, plus enterprise data science and analytics teams. Named users and case-study customers include Johnson Matthey, Somerset NHS Foundation Trust, S&P Global, CIBC and Intuit. Customer applications span finance (real-time dashboards, risk models, portfolio reporting), energy and utilities (grid monitoring, sensor visualization, operational forecasting), manufacturing (production line analytics, quality control, predictive maintenance), life sciences (clinical trial visualization, drug discovery, regulatory reporting), science and engineering, and geospatial analytics. Dash Enterprise is described as used by global banks, utilities and national labs, and the open-source tools by Fortune 500 companies, research labs and universities.
Geography
Headquartered in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, with users and customers worldwide, including Fortune 500 companies, research labs and universities; referenced customers include organizations in Canada, the United States and the United Kingdom.
History
After its founding in Montreal, Plotly appeared in "startup row" at PyCon 2013 and later sponsored the SciPy 2018 conference. It raised a $5.5 million Series A led by MHS Capital with participation from Siemens Venture Capital, Rho Ventures, Real Ventures and Silicon Valley Bank. It was named one of the Top 20 Hottest Innovative Companies in Canada by the Canadian Innovation Exchange, and in 2020 was named a Best Place to Work by the Canadian SME National Business Awards and nominated as Business of the Year. Alongside the open-source libraries, the company introduced Chart Studio Cloud and Chart Studio Enterprise, then Dash and Dash Enterprise for organization-wide app deployment, and more recently Plotly Studio and Plotly Cloud. Leadership is currently led by CEO Jim McIntosh, with co-founder Chris Parmer as CPO and early employee Ben Postlethwaite as VP of Engineering.
Risks & controversies
The Wikipedia article on the company carries an editorial notice that it relies excessively on primary sources, dated September 2024. Wikipedia gives the founding year as 2012, while internal records list 2013.
Compiled by commissioned research from 7 cited public sources — announcements, filings, and press listed under research sources below.
Key figures
latest reportedCompany-reported or press-reported figures, each dated to when it was claimed — not independently audited.
Competitors · 3
by search overlap
Companies competing with Plotly for the same Google search keywords, organic and paid, via search-intersection analysis.
Timeline · 8
launches, deals, and filingsRelease reduces resource usage and improves reliability and security.
Adds support for Plotly hoveranywhere and clickanywhere events in dcc.Graph.
Updates the sendDataToCloud modebar button to upload charts to Plotly Cloud.
Plotly was named a Best Place to Work and nominated as Business of the Year by the Canadian SME National Business Awards.
Recognition by the Canadian Innovation Exchange.
Dated company events from announcements, filings, and press; legal rows summarize public dockets and regulator releases.
In the news
▸Research sources · 7
primary sources listed
- Plotlyplotly.com · web
7 public sources were cited for this profile; the first-party ones are listed here.
Frequently asked questions
- What does Plotly do?
- Montreal-based maker of open-source graphing libraries (Plotly.js, Plotly.py, Dash) and enterprise data-app platforms.
- Who founded Plotly?
- Plotly was founded by Alex Johnson in 2013.
- Who are Plotly's investors?
- Plotly's investors include Rho Ventures, Vanedge Capital, Vanedge Capital Limited Partnership, MHS Capital.