Uniform Color Handling: PX functions automatically switch between continuous and categorical color based on the input type.Styling Control: PX functions read styling information from the default figure template, and support commonly-needed cosmetic controls like category_orders and color_discrete_map to precisely control categorical variables.Automatic Hover Labels: PX functions populate the hover-label using the labels mentioned above, and provide extra control with the hover_name and hover_data arguments.Automatic Figure Labelling: PX functions label axes, legends and colorbars based in the input DataFrame or xarray, and provide extra control with the labels argument.Traces are automatically linked to a correctly-configured subplot of the appropriate type. Traces' legendgroup and showlegend attributes are set such that only one legend item appears per unique combination of discrete color, symbol and/or line-dash. Automatic Trace and Layout configuration: PX functions will create one trace per animation frame for each unique combination of data values mapped to discrete color, symbol, line-dash, facet-row and/or facet-column.Flexible Input Formats: PX functions accept input in a variety of formats, from lists and dicts to long-form or wide-form Pandas DataFrames to numpy arrays and xarrays to GeoPandas GeoDataFrames.Sensible, Overridable Defaults: PX functions will infer sensible defaults wherever possible, and will always let you override them.Every PX function returns a aph_objects.Figure object, so you can edit it using all the same methods like update_layout and add_trace.
Throughout the plotly documentation, you will find the Plotly Express way of building figures at the top of any applicable page, followed by a section on how to use graph objects to build similar figures. Every Plotly Express function uses graph objects internally and returns a aph_objects.Figure instance. Plotly Express is a built-in part of the plotly library, and is the recommended starting point for creating most common figures. The plotly.express module (usually imported as px) contains functions that can create entire figures at once, and is referred to as Plotly Express or PX.