Anyways, as a user of the three, I find that the main advantage of gnuplot is that you can do simpler plots more easily than with the others, as there's often no boilerplate needed. I don't mean, "almost no boilerplate"; I actually mean zero boilerplate. The complete gnuplot program
plot sin(x)
is difficult to beat. However, even if you can do everything that you want with gnuplot, some complex plots may become a bit unwieldy to describe.
Regarding quality, I guess this concerns mainly the default settings. The answer depends entirely on your tastes. In my case I find the matlab defaults of a very good quality, followed by those of gnuplot. I don't like the default settings of plotly and matplotlib.
Thanks! Yes, a bit off topic, but it was the closest post in which to ask this question that I had.
I have used all three. GnuPlot is clearly fastest, but the documentation and community help are limited.
It seems not very flexible either.PGFPlots beats them all IMHO!
I tend to think most of the Gnu software is in decline.
Anyways, as a user of the three, I find that the main advantage of gnuplot is that you can do simpler plots more easily than with the others, as there's often no boilerplate needed. I don't mean, "almost no boilerplate"; I actually mean zero boilerplate. The complete gnuplot program
is difficult to beat. However, even if you can do everything that you want with gnuplot, some complex plots may become a bit unwieldy to describe.Regarding quality, I guess this concerns mainly the default settings. The answer depends entirely on your tastes. In my case I find the matlab defaults of a very good quality, followed by those of gnuplot. I don't like the default settings of plotly and matplotlib.