Personally, I find matplotlib far more intuitive. It's really easy to just get a plot from the repl in about 3 seconds. It also give you the kind of control you need to produce a publication style figure. But it is really limited if you want basic interactivity, like an informative tooltip. Plotly has much better interactivity. You basically get the tooltips and nice zooming for free. But plotly sucks when it comes to creating one off plots. The whole thing is tied to display in a browser, which I find incredibly annoying. If you aren't building a web page, and aren't using a Jupyter notebook, it's quite the pain.
