There are a number of packages that we can use to make interactive plots in Shiny. Personally I use a lot of plotly (by that I mean their original syntax, not ggploty() which is nice but not sufficient), RStudio seems to favour dygraphs (at least for time series) and I've seen people use both highcharts and anycharts.
What is interactive? By a broad definition, ggplot and ggvis can be considered to be interactive when incorporated into an interactive shiny app. However, when I say interactive I mainly refer to the ability of hoover-functions.
I like plotly, it has a syntax that takes advantage of the magrittr package and it is easily linked to basic dplyr-functions. It does have a tidyverse-feel to it. However, it is obvious that plotly is not built for Shiny and therefore can be a little bit laborious. Furthermore I am not fully satisifed in how plotly-plots behave in Shiny apps.
What are your experiences with these packages? Is there anyone who has delved deeper into this, running performance tests on these packages when incorporated in Shiny apps?
This topic mainly refers to basic plots such as time series, scatter plots, bar plots and so on. For maps, use this topic.