Three.js
Hacker ApprovedThe most recommended of 14 graphics libraries
Free JavaScript library for building 3D scenes in the browser, praised for its documentation, examples and fast iteration. Caveat: its size, overhead and performance costs bother some on heavier projects.
Free JavaScript library for building 3D scenes in the browser, praised for its documentation, examples and fast iteration. Caveat: its size, overhead and performance costs bother some on heavier projects.
60 people gave an opinion
- recommend it
- 49
- criticize it
- 11
- approval share
- 82%
Recommended in 12 of 13 months
- November 2025: recommended
- December 2025: recommended
- January 2026: recommended
- February 2026: recommended
- March 2026: recommended
- April 2026: recommended
- May 2026: recommended
- June 2026: recommended
- July 2026: recommended
- August 2026: recommended
- September 2026: recommended
- October 2026: recommended
- November 2026: not recommended (month in progress)
Why it carries the badge
- 49 people recommend itNeeds 10 or more, met.
- 4.5 recommenders for every criticNeeds 2 to 1 or better, met.
- Recommended in 12 of 13 monthsNeeds 4 or more, met.
The same three rules apply to every product, and the badge can’t be bought. How the badge works
What people say about it
The reasons people give, with the number of comments that give each one. Open a reason to read what they said.
Why people recommend it
Each mark is one comment
Easy to work with
“The library is extremely well-documented.”
Comment from 3 Aug 2026 in “Karpathy's Pelican” “threejs.org is very easy to work with.”
Comment from 11 Oct 2026 in “Show HN: Kindlefall a 3D ARPG in the browser, built with Three.js” “It's a pretty great environment to work in.”
Comment from 6 Sep 2026 in “Show HN: Fly By – retro biplane flying game” - Comment from 6 May 2026 in “I completed 100 Days of Java over 5 years and mapped the journey as a graph”
Works well with AI coding tools
“Three.js + OpenAI or Claude do almost everything for this purpose”
Comment from 24 Oct 2026 in “Animations for System Builders” “It's very easy to vibe code cool three.js OSM things.”
Comment from 4 Aug 2026 in “Hop.earth – OpenStreetMap based car racing game” “Opus can make really pretty 3d models even using three.js primitives”
Comment from 16 Mar 2026 in “Show HN: Claude Code skills that build complete Godot games” Standard abstraction over WebGL
“threejs is pretty much the abstractions you'd end up writing your self if you wanted to use webgl”
Comment from 5 Apr 2026 in “Show HN: M. C. Escher spiral in WebGL inspired by 3Blue1Brown” “it's the de facto standard for doing WebGL 3D”
Comment from 23 Apr 2026 in “Introducing GPT-5.5” Capable for animation and physics
“Three.js has decent AnimationMixer support that handles a lot of this without rolling your own state machine.”
Comment from 6 Apr 2026 in “Show HN: M. C. Escher spiral in WebGL inspired by 3Blue1Brown” “Complex 3D using three.js and rigid body physics engines in wasm workers like rapier is feasible now.”
Comment from 6 Jul 2026 in “Show HN: Homegames. An open-source game platform I've been making for 8 years”
What people warn about
Each mark is one comment
Performance and memory concerns
“I couldn't stand seeing memory ramp up every frame due to threejs internals”
Comment from 25 Oct 2026 in “Rewriting a Commercial Engine in Jai” “essentially unsolvable with three.js just cause GC causes them”
Comment from 25 Oct 2026 in “Rewriting a Commercial Engine in Jai” “I'm always concerned about the performance impact of threejs”
Comment from 28 Oct 2026 in “Show HN: Squishy 3D helpers powered by Three.js” - Comment from 28 May 2026 in “Hallucinate – Massively Multiplayer Online Rave”
- Comment from 29 Nov 2025 in “Shopify pulls off real time 8K browser rendering on the Exosphere”
Breaks down as complexity grows
“Any SOTA model can one-shot something that looks pretty similar to something from Three's examples, but things go south quickly when attempting to increase the complexity”
Comment from 4 Jan 2026 in “The Suck Is Why We're Here” “Asking a model to animate a scene in Three.js is a square peg/round hole”
Comment from 2 Aug 2026 in “Karpathy's Pelican” “looked okay-ish but broke the moment you touched anything”
Comment from 16 Mar 2026 in “Show HN: Claude Code skills that build complete Godot games” Heavy file size and overhead
“You just can't seem to do much with WebGL without spending a few hundred kilobytes of code.”
Comment from 11 Dec 2025 in “Show HN: VoxCSS – A DOM based voxel engine” “I took the three.js driven page weight from about 600KB (500KB being three.js)”
Comment from 2 Aug 2026 in “Karpathy's Pelican” “it's a 0.5MB overhead your game doesn't need”
Comment from 5 Sep 2026 in “Building Games with Astra”
Other graphics libraries people recommend
The four most recommended other graphics libraries, with the same counts for each, so you can compare like for like. The tick on each bar marks the 2 to 1 line the badge needs.
| Product | Recommend | Criticize | Approval | Months | Owned | Badge |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Three.jsThis page | 49 | 11 | 82% | 12 | — | Approved |
| wgpu | 27 | 9 | 75% | 11 | — | Approved |
| Skia | 14 | 5 | 74% | 8 | — | Approved |
| LVGL | 10 | 2 | 83% | 5 | — | Approved |
| Dawn WebGPU | 9 | 6 | 60% | 6 | — | — |
What people said
40 of the 66 comments that mention it, newest first. Each links to the original comment.
“I'm always concerned about the performance impact of threejs”
“essentially unsolvable with three.js just cause GC causes them”
“I couldn't stand seeing memory ramp up every frame due to threejs internals”
“it's the only framework that in my testing actually reliably compares to threejs webgl renderer”
“One of the best things about three.hs is the extremely fast feedback look with HMR”
“Three.js + OpenAI or Claude do almost everything for this purpose”
“threejs.org is very easy to work with.”
“Simplest is browser game with three.js, the only lib you need.”
“Defaulting to three.js for games just feels smoke-and-mirrors to make them look better”
“It's a pretty great environment to work in.”
“it's a 0.5MB overhead your game doesn't need”
“This demo is based on the wonderful (and actually hand-crafted) Three.js.”
“It's very easy to vibe code cool three.js OSM things.”
“The library is extremely well-documented.”
“Asking a model to animate a scene in Three.js is a square peg/round hole”
“I took the three.js driven page weight from about 600KB (500KB being three.js)”
“Complex 3D using three.js and rigid body physics engines in wasm workers like rapier is feasible now.”
“use a library like three.js (the games I make are far simpler so I don't use many libraries)”
“comes with many limitations compared to the what the rendering engines in native game engines can do”
“I initially tried Three.js but it was way too slow”
“simply write a 3D program with a ready-made library today”
“It’s pretty easy and so so beautiful.”
“it's the de facto standard for doing WebGL 3D”
“Three.js has decent AnimationMixer support that handles a lot of this without rolling your own state machine.”
“threejs is pretty much the abstractions you'd end up writing your self if you wanted to use webgl”
“The three team has been making great progress with SSGI and webgpu in general”
“I built Capybara Simulator in a day using Three.js, Meshy AI for 3D assets”
“Opus can make really pretty 3d models even using three.js primitives”
“looked okay-ish but broke the moment you touched anything”
“I really recommend to make web apps instead for vibe coding”
“I've developed over 200 games[0] using libGDX and threejs.”
“compared to setting everything in https://threejs.org/examples/webgpu_hdr.html to max”
“CPU usage was lessened as well, at least on my mobile and two desktops”
“Anything interesting I have made has been in vanilla javascript/three js/react three fiber.”
“Any SOTA model can one-shot something that looks pretty similar to something from Three's examples, but things go south quickly when attempting to increase the complexity”
“building the real-time Globe visualization with Three.js”
“You just can't seem to do much with WebGL without spending a few hundred kilobytes of code.”
“The front page for Three.js usually has some nice examples too.”
“Three.js is not particularly fast either”
“ThreeJS is awesome btw, I exported a GDB file I think from a CAD program and imported it into ThreeJS/able to animate each part pretty cool.”
Counts come from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026. How we count. Report a mistake.