Plotly in Python: Interactive Charts with Reflex

Plotly is a popular Python graphing library for creating interactive, publication-quality charts. Reflex wraps it with the rx.plotly component so you can embed any Plotly or Plotly Express figure — line charts, scatter plots, histograms, heatmaps, or 3D surface plots — directly into a Python web app with no JavaScript. Because Reflex compiles to a full-stack web app, these charts stay interactive in the browser and can update live from your app state.

Let's create a line graph of life expectancy in Canada.

Plotly Express (plotly.express, imported as px) builds common chart types in a single line of Python, and every figure renders in Reflex with rx.plotly.

Create a Plotly Express bar chart with px.bar:

Create a Plotly scatter plot with px.scatter:

Create a Plotly pie chart with px.pie:

Create a Plotly heatmap with px.density_heatmap:

Create a Plotly histogram with px.histogram:

Create a Plotly box plot with px.box:

Use locale to localize Plotly number/date formatting and modebar labels:

You can still pass config; when both are provided, locale= is applied as the final locale value.

Let's create a 3D surface plot of Mount Bruno. This is a slightly more complicated example, but it wraps in Reflex using the same method. In fact, you can wrap any figure using the same approach.

📊 Dataset source: mt_bruno_elevation.csv

If the figure is set as a state var, it can be updated during run time.

Use update_layout() method to update the layout of your chart. Checkout Plotly Layouts for all layouts props.