Subplots in Python

How to make subplots with Plotly's Python graphing library. Examples of stacked, custom-sized, gridded, and annotated subplots.

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Subplots and Plotly Express¶

Plotly Express is the easy-to-use, high-level interface to Plotly, which operates on a variety of types of data and produces easy-to-style figures.

Plotly Express does not support arbitrary subplot capabilities, instead it supports faceting by a given data dimension, and it also supports marginal charts to display distribution information.

This page documents the usage of the lower-level plotly.subplots module and the make_subplots function it exposes to construct figures with arbitrary subplots. Plotly Express faceting uses make_subplots internally so adding traces to Plotly Express facets works just as documented here, with fig.add_trace(..., row=<R>, col=<C>).

Simple Subplot¶

Figures with subplots are created using the make_subplots function from the plotly.subplots module.

Here is an example of creating a figure that includes two scatter traces which are side-by-side since there are 2 columns and 1 row in the subplot layout.

In [1]:

from plotly.subplots import make_subplots
import plotly.graph_objects as go

fig = make_subplots(rows=1, cols=2)

fig.add_trace(
    go.Scatter(x=[1, 2, 3], y=[4, 5, 6]),
    row=1, col=1
)

fig.add_trace(
    go.Scatter(x=[20, 30, 40], y=[50, 60, 70]),
    row=1, col=2
)

fig.update_layout(height=600, width=800, title_text="Side By Side Subplots")
fig.show()

Stacked Subplots¶

Here is an example of creating a figure with subplots that are stacked on top of each other since there are 3 rows and 1 column in the subplot layout.

In [2]:

from plotly.subplots import make_subplots
import plotly.graph_objects as go

fig = make_subplots(rows=3, cols=1)

fig.add_trace(go.Scatter(
    x=[3, 4, 5],
    y=[1000, 1100, 1200],
), row=1, col=1)

fig.add_trace(go.Scatter(
    x=[2, 3, 4],
    y=[100, 110, 120],
), row=2, col=1)

fig.add_trace(go.Scatter(
    x=[0, 1, 2],
    y=[10, 11, 12]
), row=3, col=1)


fig.update_layout(height=600, width=600, title_text="Stacked Subplots")
fig.show()

Multiple Subplots¶

Here is an example of creating a 2 x 2 subplot grid and populating each subplot with a single scatter trace.

In [3]:

import plotly.graph_objects as go
from plotly.subplots import make_subplots

fig = make_subplots(rows=2, cols=2, start_cell="bottom-left")

fig.add_trace(go.Scatter(x=[1, 2, 3], y=[4, 5, 6]),
              row=1, col=1)

fig.add_trace(go.Scatter(x=[20, 30, 40], y=[