Great reference with many open-source useful plotting and visualization tools Over the years many different plotting modules and packages have been developed for Python. For most of that time there was no clear favorite package, but recently matplotlib has become the most widely used. Nevertheless, many of the others are still available and may suit your tastes or needs better. Some of these are interfaces to existing plotting libraries while others are Python-centered new implementations.
NodeBox is a Mac OS X application that lets you create 2D visuals (static, animated or interactive) using Python programming code and export them as a PDF or a QuickTime movie. NodeBox is free and well-documented.
matplotlib is a python 2D plotting library which produces publication quality figures in a variety of hardcopy formats and interactive environments across platforms. matplotlib can be used in python scripts, the python and ipython shell (ala matlab or mathematica), web application servers, and six graphical user interface toolkits. matplotlib tries to make easy things easy and hard things possible. You can generate plots, histograms, power spectra, bar charts, errorcharts, scatterplots, etc, with just a few lines of code.