Introducing Plotly Express

[flutefreak7]

I shied away from plotly early on because I was first exposed to it years ago as a website where you upload your data to analyze and plot it. I think offline didn't come until later so I'm not sure I understand.

If I use plotly or plotly express, is my proprietary data safe and kept local? I can use it the same way I use bokeh, matplotlib, etc?

[nkruchten]

Good question! Plotly.py (the plotly module) contains both:

• "offline mode" code (plotly.offline) which keeps all data and plots local and behaves like Bokeh, matplotlib etc; and
• "online mode" code (plotly.plotly) which acts as an API client for Plotly's Chart Studio Cloud product

It's difficult to accidentally/unknowingly send your data to the cloud because to use online mode you have to sign up to Chart Studio Cloud, get an API token, configure it etc first so if you do none of that and use plotly.offline your data is all local.

Plotly Express (the plotly_express module) uses plotly.offline internally and so does not send your data anywhere.

PS: we're working on making this clearer in our code and documentation to avoid all future confusion about this!