Comparison
ORTEX Charts Compared With TradingView Lightweight Charts
TradingView Lightweight Charts is a free, Apache 2.0 series renderer of 55.3 KB gzip. ORTEX Charts is a commercial financial charting library whose comparable line-chart build is 37.5 KB, whose full shell with a toolbar, indicators, drawings and order flow is 76.9 KB in one file, and which first paints 100,000 bars in 32 ms against 388 ms. Lightweight Charts costs nothing and ships no toolbar, no drawings, no indicators and no order flow; ORTEX Charts costs $590 per developer per year and ships all four.
Payload and timing figures were measured on 2026-09-04 in Chromium against the vendors' own published files and public demos; the feature review was carried out on 2026-09-03. Prices are the vendors' own published prices where they publish one, and are marked as unpublished where they do not. Where Lightweight Charts is better, this page says so.
Head to head
How the Two Line Up
Every cell is either a measurement or a published term. A cell that says "not measured" or "not published" is not an omission to be filled in later with a guess: it is the honest state of the evidence.
| What | ORTEX Charts | Lightweight Charts |
|---|---|---|
| A chart with one series, gzip | 37.5 KB in one file | 55.3 KB in one file |
| Candles and volume, gzip | 55.7 KB in one file | Not published as a separate build |
| A full shell with a toolbar, gzip | 76.9 KB in one file | Not offered |
| Create to first paint, 100,000 bars | 32 ms | 388 ms |
| Create to first paint, 10,000 bars | 44 ms | 98 ms |
| A live tick | 1.8 ms including a full synchronous redraw | 4.2 ms for the update call alone |
| License | Commercial, per developer or per product | Apache 2.0, open source |
| Price | $590 per developer per year | $0 |
| Built-in indicator library | Yes, plus your own in JavaScript | None |
| Drawing tools | Yes, with magnet, undo and JSON | None |
| Order flow | Footprint, volume profile, market profile, delta, cumulative delta, relative volume | None |
What Is TradingView Lightweight Charts Good At?
- It is free under Apache 2.0, with no license key, no domain binding and no contract to sign.
- It draws the standard series set well: candlestick, bar, line, area, baseline and histogram.
- It is widely used, so the answers to common questions are already written somewhere.
- Custom series and primitives are supported, so a determined team can extend it.
- Like ORTEX Charts, it is one file with no chunk loader, and it is licensed for products behind a login or a paywall.
What Does TradingView Lightweight Charts Cost?
- Nothing to license. The cost is the build: a toolbar, a drawing layer, an indicator engine, order flow, replay and alerts are all yours to write and to maintain.
What Can TradingView Lightweight Charts Not Do?
- No toolbar, no menus and no chart application shell.
- No drawing tools, and therefore no magnet, no undo and no serialization of a user's annotations.
- No built-in indicator library.
- No footprint bars, volume profile, market profile, delta, cumulative delta or relative volume.
- No bar replay, no linked charts with a shared crosshair and no draggable price alerts.
- No Heikin-Ashi or hollow candles, and no Renko, Kagi, Point and Figure or line break.
Where Does ORTEX Charts Win?
- Payload, like for like. A chart with one series is 37.5 KB in ORTEX Charts against 55.3 KB in Lightweight Charts 5, measured the same way on the same day.
- Start-up at size. Create to first paint at 100,000 bars is 32 ms against 388 ms, and 44 ms against 98 ms at 10,000 bars.
- Everything above the renderer: toolbar, drawings, indicators, order flow, replay, alerts, linked charts and session-anchored intraday bars are shipped rather than scoped.
- A live tick costs 1.8 ms including a full synchronous redraw, against 4.2 ms for the Lightweight Charts update call alone.
Where Does TradingView Lightweight Charts Still Win?
- Price. Lightweight Charts is free and ORTEX Charts is not.
- License freedom. Apache 2.0 asks nothing of you; a commercial license is a purchase order and a key.
- Community size. A library used by thousands of projects has an answer for more questions than one used by dozens.
Which One Should You Choose?
Choose Lightweight Charts when the requirement really is a series renderer and the chrome around it is your product. Choose ORTEX Charts when the toolbar, the drawings, the indicators and the order flow would otherwise be a quarter of engineering time, and when the chart has to be smaller and faster than the free option rather than larger and slower.
Features
What Each One Ships
A filled circle is shipped and demonstrable, a half circle is present but partial, an empty circle is absent. The notes are the honest part.
| Feature | ORTEX | Lightweight Charts | Note |
|---|---|---|---|
| Candlestick, bar, line, area, baseline, histogram | ● | ● | |
| Heikin-Ashi and hollow candles | ● | ○ | |
| Renko, Kagi, Point and Figure, line break | ● | ○ | |
| Multiple resizable panes with independent scales | ● | ◐ | |
| Built-in indicator library | ● | ○ | |
| Custom indicators without a proprietary language | ● | ◐ | Advanced Charts uses Pine Script for user studies. |
| Drawing tools | ● | ○ | |
| Footprint bars with imbalance marking | ● | ○ | |
| Volume profile and market profile | ● | ○ | Exact per-price volume needs the aggressor data ORTEX Charts accepts. |
| Delta, cumulative delta, relative volume | ● | ○ | |
| Bar replay with higher-timeframe followers | ● | ○ | Replay on a second timeframe is one of the most requested missing features on TradingView. |
| Draggable price alerts reported to the host | ● | ○ | |
| Session-anchored intraday bars | ● | ○ | |
| Linked charts and shared crosshair | ● | ◐ | |
| Host-owned layouts and drawing storage | ● | ○ | Advanced Charts expects a save and load server implementing their contract. |
| Color-blind safe palettes out of the box | ● | ○ | |
| Sparkline build under 10 KB | ● | ○ | |
| Treemap and heatmap in the same family | ● | ○ | |
| React bindings | ● | ◐ | |
| One file, no chunk loader | ● | ● | |
| Licensed for private, authenticated and paywalled applications | ● | ● | |
| Screen-reader description and data table | ◐ | ○ | Highcharts has the strongest accessibility story in the category. ORTEX Charts has ARIA on the shell and keyboard pan and zoom; the description and data table are open work. |
Licensing and price
The Part That Decides the Shortlist
ORTEX Charts
Per developer for Team, per product for White-label, OEM by contract.
$590 per developer per year for Team; $299 per product per month for White-label; OEM as agreed.
Canvas 2D rather than WebGL: built for financial data sizes, not for ten-million-point scientific plots.
TradingView Lightweight Charts
Apache 2.0, open source.
$0.
A series renderer. The toolbar, drawings, indicators and order flow are your build.
Other comparisons: Advanced Charts, Highcharts Stock, ChartIQ, SciChart JS.