In the [relational plot tutorial](relational.html#relational-tutorial) we saw how to use different visual representations to show the relationship between multiple variables in a dataset. In the examples, we focused on cases where the main relationship was between two numerical variables. If one of the main variables is “categorical” (divided into discrete groups) it may be helpful to use a more specialized approach to visualization.
In seaborn, there are several different ways to visualize a relationship involving categorical data. Similar to the relationship between [`relplot()`](../generated/seaborn.relplot.html#seaborn.relplot"seaborn.relplot") and either [`scatterplot()`](../generated/seaborn.scatterplot.html#seaborn.scatterplot"seaborn.scatterplot") or [`lineplot()`](../generated/seaborn.lineplot.html#seaborn.lineplot"seaborn.lineplot"), there are two ways to make these plots. There are a number of axes-level functions for plotting categorical data in different ways and a figure-level interface, [`catplot()`](../generated/seaborn.catplot.html#seaborn.catplot"seaborn.catplot"), that gives unified higher-level access to them.