Skip to main content
Pre-release

This release is a pre-release and may not be stable for production use.

Vega-Altair

github actions typedlib_mypy JOSS Paper PyPI - Downloads

Vega-Altair is a declarative statistical visualization library for Python. With Vega-Altair, you can spend more time understanding your data and its meaning. Vega-Altair's API is simple, friendly and consistent and built on top of the powerful Vega-Lite JSON specification. This elegant simplicity produces beautiful and effective visualizations with a minimal amount of code.

Vega-Altair was originally developed by Jake Vanderplas and Brian Granger in close collaboration with the UW Interactive Data Lab. The Vega-Altair open source project is not affiliated with Altair Engineering, Inc.

Documentation

See Vega-Altair's Documentation Site as well as the Tutorial Notebooks. You can run the notebooks directly in your browser by clicking on one of the following badges:

Binder Colab

Example

Here is an example using Vega-Altair to quickly visualize and display a dataset with the native Vega-Lite renderer in the JupyterLab:

import altair as alt

# load a simple dataset as a pandas DataFrame
from altair.datasets import data
cars = data.cars()

alt.Chart(cars).mark_point().encode(
    x='Horsepower',
    y='Miles_per_Gallon',
    color='Origin',
)

Vega-Altair Visualization

One of the unique features of Vega-Altair, inherited from Vega-Lite, is a declarative grammar of not just visualization, but interaction. With a few modifications to the example above we can create a linked histogram that is filtered based on a selection of the scatter plot.

import altair as alt
from altair.datasets import data

source = data.cars()

brush = alt.selection_interval()

points = alt.Chart(source).mark_point().encode(
    x='Horsepower',
    y='Miles_per_Gallon',
    color=alt.when(brush).then("Origin").otherwise(alt.value("lightgray"))
).add_params(
    brush
)

bars = alt.Chart(source).mark_bar().encode(
    y='Origin',
    color='Origin',
    x='count(Origin)'
).transform_filter(
    brush
)

points & bars

Vega-Altair Visualization Gif

Features

  • Carefully-designed, declarative Python API.
  • Auto-generated internal Python API that guarantees visualizations are type-checked and in full conformance with the Vega-Lite specification.
  • Display visualizations in JupyterLab, Jupyter Notebook, Visual Studio Code, on GitHub and nbviewer, and many more.
  • Export visualizations to various formats such as PNG/SVG images, stand-alone HTML pages and the Online Vega-Lite Editor.
  • Serialize visualizations as JSON files.

Installation

Vega-Altair can be installed with:

pip install altair

If you are using the conda package manager, the equivalent is:

conda install altair -c conda-forge

For full installation instructions, please see the documentation.

Getting Help

If you have a question that is not addressed in the documentation, you can post it on StackOverflow using the altair tag. For bugs and feature requests, please open a Github Issue.

Development

uv Ruff pytest

For information on how to contribute your developments back to the Vega-Altair repository, see CONTRIBUTING.md

Citing Vega-Altair

JOSS Paper

If you use Vega-Altair in academic work, please consider citing https://joss.theoj.org/papers/10.21105/joss.01057 as

@article{VanderPlas2018,
    doi = {10.21105/joss.01057},
    url = {https://doi.org/10.21105/joss.01057},
    year = {2018},
    publisher = {The Open Journal},
    volume = {3},
    number = {32},
    pages = {1057},
    author = {Jacob VanderPlas and Brian Granger and Jeffrey Heer and Dominik Moritz and Kanit Wongsuphasawat and Arvind Satyanarayan and Eitan Lees and Ilia Timofeev and Ben Welsh and Scott Sievert},
    title = {Altair: Interactive Statistical Visualizations for Python},
    journal = {Journal of Open Source Software}
}

Please additionally consider citing the Vega-Lite project, which Vega-Altair is based on: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1109/TVCG.2016.2599030

@article{Satyanarayan2017,
    author={Satyanarayan, Arvind and Moritz, Dominik and Wongsuphasawat, Kanit and Heer, Jeffrey},
    title={Vega-Lite: A Grammar of Interactive Graphics},
    journal={IEEE transactions on visualization and computer graphics},
    year={2017},
    volume={23},
    number={1},
    pages={341-350},
    publisher={IEEE}
} 

Release files for altair 6.1.0.dev20260126

For a detailed explanation of source distributions (sdists) and built distributions (wheels), please see the package formats documentation.

Source distribution (sdist)

Source distribution for altair 6.1.0.dev20260126
File Size Uploaded
altair-6.1.0.dev20260126.tar.gz 764.2 kB Details

Built distribution (wheel)

Table of built distributions (wheels) for altair 6.1.0.dev20260126
File Interpreter ABI Platform
altair-6.1.0.dev20260126-py3-none-any.whl Python 3 none any Details

Total release size: 1.6 MB

Release files / altair-6.1.0.dev20260126.tar.gz

Download URL altair-6.1.0.dev20260126.tar.gz
Size 764.2 kB
Tags Source
SHA-256 checksum
How to use checksums
c418897dddf4af7327486899c3914b57f4c1fcbcf970f943aeb58d7305a1c849
BLAKE2b-256 checksum
How to use checksums
ac0055594ad932d9bd5c0d59341c51657e8c39e988039f9b773727ab80a2e535
Upload date
Uploaded using Trusted Publishing?
What is trusted publishing?
Yes
Uploaded via twine/6.1.0 CPython/3.13.7

Provenance

Provenance describes where a file came from. On PyPI, provenance is shared via attestations, which provide a verifiable record of the build or publishing details. View details, limitations and caveats.

PyPI Publish Attestation

PyPI verified that this artifact, at this checksum, originated from the publisher listed below.

Signed by GitHub Actions, verified by PyPI on Jan 26, 2026.

Transparency log

Release files / altair-6.1.0.dev20260126-py3-none-any.whl

Download URL altair-6.1.0.dev20260126-py3-none-any.whl
Size 795.7 kB
Tags Python 3
SHA-256 checksum
How to use checksums
4361195f736575cf19fb1458ea477a66d7513dddb241bf383b16606fa4ad516f
BLAKE2b-256 checksum
How to use checksums
0171afa432c768bd0492e7650e4e2734073dfe5b45f16ca7a244bace0d97bb4c
Upload date
Uploaded using Trusted Publishing?
What is trusted publishing?
Yes
Uploaded via twine/6.1.0 CPython/3.13.7

Provenance

Provenance describes where a file came from. On PyPI, provenance is shared via attestations, which provide a verifiable record of the build or publishing details. View details, limitations and caveats.

PyPI Publish Attestation

PyPI verified that this artifact, at this checksum, originated from the publisher listed below.

Signed by GitHub Actions, verified by PyPI on Jan 26, 2026.

Transparency log

Release history Release notifications | RSS feed

6.3.0

2 release files

6.2.2

2 release files

6.2.1

2 release files

6.1.0

2 release files

This release

6.0.0

2 release files

5.5.0

2 release files

5.4.1

2 release files

5.4.0

2 release files

5.3.0

2 release files

5.2.0

2 release files

5.1.2

2 release files

5.1.1

2 release files

5.1.0

2 release files

5.0.1

2 release files

5.0.0

2 release files

4.2.2

2 release files

4.2.1

2 release files

4.2.0

2 release files

4.1.0

2 release files

4.0.1

2 release files

4.0.0

2 release files

3.3.0

2 release files

3.2.0

2 release files

3.1.0

2 release files

3.0.1

2 release files

3.0.0

2 release files

2.4.1

2 release files

2.3.0

2 release files

2.2.2

2 release files

2.2.1

2 release files

2.2.0

2 release files

2.1.0

2 release files

2.0.1

1 release file

2.0.0

1 release file

1.2.1

1 release file

1.2.0

1 release file

1.0.0

2 release files

Anthropic, PBC Visionary sponsor Bloomberg Visionary sponsor Hudson River Trading Visionary sponsor Meta Visionary sponsor NVIDIA Visionary sponsor Microsoft Sustainability sponsor Depot Continuous Integration AWS Cloud computing and Security Sponsor Datadog Monitoring Fastly CDN Google Download Analytics Sentry Error logging StatusPage Status page