16 network visualization tools that you should know!
By Dr. Verónica Espinoza. 2023
▪Twitter (X) @Verukita1 ▪LinkedIn: Dra. Verónica Espinoza ▪website: www.nethabitus.org ▪Support my work here
16 network visualization tools
In this story, I share 16 tools for network visualization. Each tool offers different functions, so the choice of tool will depend on your research needs.
There are undoubtedly other visualization tools, but the goal of this story is to share with you the ones I have used. In fact, for some of the 16 tools, I have already previously written a story, so I am also happy to share it with you.
The poster I present on the cover of this story is the second version of a poster I previously published on Twitter and LinkedIn. In this second version of the poster I updated some networks, additionally I have added more visualization tools and I wrote this story on Medium where I describe each tool.
For each tool you will find:
- A brief description of the tool.
- The link for a story I wrote about that tool (if applicable).
- A link to the tool’s website to learn more.
- A screenshot of an example of a network.
😉I hope this story is useful for you.
🏁Lets start!
1.-Gephi
Gephi is a tool for data analysts and scientists keen to explore and understand graphs. Like Photoshop™ but for graph data, the user interacts with the representation, manipulate the structures, shapes and colors to reveal hidden patterns.
The goal is to help data analysts to make hypothesis, intuitively discover patterns, isolate structure singularities or faults during data sourcing. It is a complementary tool to traditional statistics, as visual thinking with interactive interfaces is now recognized to facilitate reasoning. This is a software for Exploratory Data Analysis, a paradigm appeared in the Visual Analytics field of research [1, 2].
😉Learn more about Gephi in this story I wrote:
What is Gephi? Meet this useful network analysis tool
You can also explore Gephi Lite, this is a free and open-source web application to visualize and explore networks and graphs. It is a web-based, lighter version of Gephi [3].
😉Learn more about Gephi-lite in this story I wrote:
Learn how to make a network in Gephi-Lite and add images to the nodes (I give you the gexf file!)
🌐 https://gephi.org/gephi-lite/
2.-Cytoscape
Cytoscape is an open source software platform for visualizing molecular interaction networks and biological pathways and integrating these networks with annotations, gene expression profiles and other state data. Although Cytoscape was originally designed for biological research, now it is a general platform for complex network analysis and visualization [5].
Cytoscape core distribution provides a basic set of features for data integration, analysis, and visualization. Additional features are available as Apps (formerly called Plugins). Apps are available for network and molecular profiling analyses, new layouts, additional file format support, scripting, and connection with databases. They may be developed by anyone using the Cytoscape open API based on Java™ technology and App community development is encouraged. Most of the Apps are freely available from Cytoscape App Store [5,6].
😉Learn more about Cytoscape in this story I wrote:
Meet Cytoscape: open source software for visualizing complex networks
3.-NodeXL
The Social Media Research Foundation is the home of the network analysis tool NodeXL and is supported by a global network of academics from a wide variety of disciplines [7,8].
- NodeXL-Pro adds menus and features to Excel to simplify the tasks of getting network data, storing it, analyzing and visualizing it, and generating reports that share insights into connected structures.
- NodeXL-Pro supports all features to conduct professional social network analysis (SNA): Community clustering, influencer detection, content analysis, sentiment analysis, time series analysis and a lot more .
😉Learn more about NodeXL in this story I wrote:
Meet NodeXL-Pro: one tool, many possibilities!
🌐 https://www.smrfoundation.org/nodexl/
4.-Graphia-app
Graphia is a powerful open source visual analytics application developed to aid the interpretation of large and complex datasets. Graphia can create and visualize graphs from tables of numeric data and display the structures that result. It can also be used to visualize and analyze any data that is already in the form of a graph [9].
Graphia is designed and built by a small dedicated group of scientists working in Edinburgh, Scotland. They are passionate about graphs, the power of visualization and creating tools that aid the interpretation of complex data [9, 10].
😉Learn more about Graphia in this story I wrote:
4 reasons to know Graphia App! -Open source visual analytics application
5.-Gephisto
Gephisto is Gephi in one click! Gephisto’s design exemplifies how we can interfere with a user’s utilitarian goals, by giving them what they wish (an easy way to get a network map) but in disobedient ways (the produced map is different every time the tool is used) that encourage them to engage further with the tool’s methodological tenets [11].
As an apparatus, Gephisto aims to incentivize untrained users to become more critical of their network mapping practices [11, 12].
😉Learn more about Gephisto in this story I wrote:
🌐 https://jacomyma.github.io/gephisto/
6.-SocNetV
Social Network Visualizer (SocNetV) is a cross-platform, user-friendly free software application for social network analysis and visualization. Compute distances, eccentricity, connectedness, clique census, triad census, and Prominence indices (i.e. eigenvector, betweenness and information centrality, promixity prestige, pagerank and more). Apply intuitive visualization layouts on undirected/directed graphs, based on prominence scores or force-directed models [13].
With SocNetV you can:
- Draw social networks with a few clicks on a virtual canvas, load field data from a file in a supported format (GraphML, GraphViz, Adjacency, EdgeList, GML, Pajek, UCINET, etc) or crawl the internet to create a social network of connected webpages.
- Edit actors and ties through point-and-click, analyse graph and social network properties, produce beautiful HTML reports and embed visualization layouts to the network.
7.- Graphext
Graphext is a Data Science Platform that enables deeper Exploratory Data Analysis, richer Data Storytelling and faster Predictive Modelling [14]. Graphext is an advanced analytics solution to help businesses make better decisions based on data.
With Graphext you can:
- Bring Data from Everywhere
Connect to multiple sources like Big Query, Google CS, Snowflake, Microsoft Azure, and more.
▪Visualize Data Instantly
Explore distributions for each variable, and create interactive visualizations.
▪AI Assisted Correlation Analysis
Discover positive and negative correlations between your variables.
8.-VOSviewer
VOSviewer is a software tool for constructing and visualizing bibliometric networks. These networks may for instance include journals, researchers, or individual publications, and they can be constructed based on citation, bibliographic coupling, co-citation, or co-authorship relations [15].
VOSviewer also offers text mining functionality that can be used to construct and visualize co-occurrence networks of important terms extracted from a body of scientific literature [15].
9.-Graphistry
Graphistry brings visual graph intelligence to your big or complex data. It automatically transforms your data into interactive, visual maps built for the needs of analysts. Quickly surface relationships between events and entities with less time writing queries or wrangling data.
As the first automatically GPU-accelerated platform, harness all of your data without worrying about scale, and pivot on the fly to follow anywhere your investigation leads you. Ideal for everything from security, fraud, and IT investigations to 360° views of customers and supply chains to mapping cancer mutations, Graphistry turns the potential of your data into human insight and value [16].
👨🎓 In this story I wrote, learn how you can visualize your NodeXL data in Graphistry
Visualize your NodeXL data in Graphistry using Python
10.-Retina
Retina is a free open source web application to share network visualizations online, without any server required. It is developed by OuestWare for Tommaso Venturini from CNRS Center Internet et Société. It is released under the GNU GPLv3 license [17].
Some Features
- Retina aims at helping people sharing interactive network maps online.
- Graph editors give Retina a graph file, and tell it how their graph file should be interpreted.
- They share a link to their visualization with graph explorersGraph explorers can then see the graph and interact with it.
🌐 https://gitlab.com/ouestware/retina
11.-Tulip
Tulip is an information visualization framework dedicated to the analysis and visualization of relational data. Tulip aims to provide the developer with a complete library, supporting the design of interactive information visualization applications for relational data that can be tailored to the problems he or she is addressing [18].
Written in C++ the framework enables the development of algorithms, visual encodings, interaction techniques, data models, and domain-specific visualizations. One of the goal of Tulip is to ease the reuse of components and allows the developers to focus on programming their application. This development pipeline makes the framework efficient for research prototyping as well as the development of end-user applications [18].
🌐 https://tulip.labri.fr/site/
12.-GraphInsight
GraphInsight is a software that let you visualize complex networks and let you explore graph data through high quality interactive representations. It is flexible tool for 2d and 3d exploration of large network graphs [19].
🌐 https://github.com/CarloNicolini/GraphInsight/releases/tag/1.3.3
13.-The Vistorian tool
The Vistorian is a research prototype to build better visualizations for multivariate networks. The Vistorian is a web-based visual analytics tool including four different interactive visualizations. It allows digital humanists to analyze complex geolocated and temporal networks of individuals [20 ].
To match its particular audience — domain scientists with little or
no experience in computing — the Vistorian is based on four design
principles: simplicity, privacy, openness and extensibility. The interface and data handling has been kept as simple as possible with no requirement to write code or perform complex specification operations [20, 21].
😉Learn more about Vistorian Tool in this story I wrote:
Meet Vistorian tool: Interactive Visualizations for Dynamic and Multivariate Networks
14.-Cosmograph
Cosmograph is a web-based app — it runs in your browser but it won’t send your data anywhere. All calculations will be done right on your GPU, the faster it is the better [22].
The fastest network graph visualization tool that works in the browser. It’s capable of visualizing networks that have a million nodes and edges, and that’s not the limit! It’s free to use.
📓 Read more about Cosmograph here
15.-Kumu
Kumu makes it easy to organize complex data into relationship maps that are beautiful to look at and a pleasure to use. With Kumu you’ll be up and running in seconds, no technical background required or software to install. Kumu supports hundreds of organizations across the world to more effectively engage complex issues. Kumu works by making it easy to create a visual representation of a network or system. It is a web-based platform that allows shared access so that teams can easily collaborate [23].
And once your maps are finished, our built-in presentation builder and publishing platform make it easy to share your work with the world.
16.-Orange Data Mining
Orange Data Mining is open source machine learning and data visualization. Interactive data exploration for rapid qualitative analysis with clean visualizations. Graphic user interface allows you to focus on exploratory data analysis instead of coding, while clever defaults make fast prototyping of a data analysis workflow extremely easy [24].
Network File widget reads network files and sends the input data to its output channel. History of the most recently opened files in maintained in the widget. The widget also includes a directory with sample data sets that come pre-installed with the add-on [24].
Place widgets on the canvas, connect them, load your datasets and harvest the insight.
🌐 https://orangedatamining.com/
💥 Cite this article:
Espinoza, V. (2023). 16 network visualization tools that you should know! Medium. https://medium.com/@vespinozag/16-network-visualization-tools-that-you-should-know
😉Thanks for reading this story.
👉Find more stories I have written here
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✔Website: www.nethabitus.org
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Useful resources (open access)
🔎Find a lot of open access material (books, chapters, articles, tools & more) about network science in this story I wrote:
References
[1] Bastian M., Heymann S., Jacomy M. (2009). Gephi: an open source software for exploring and manipulating networks. International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media
[2] Gephi — The Open Graph Viz Platform [Internet]. [cited Nov 8, 2022]. Available in: https://gephi.org/
[3] Gephi Lite [Internet]. [cited 2023 Nov 2]. Available from: https://gephi.org/gephi-lite/
[4] Jacomy M. Gephi Lite [Internet]. Gephi blog. 2022 [cited 2023 Nov 2]. Available from: https://gephi.wordpress.com/2022/11/15/gephi-lite/
[5] What is Cytoscape? [Internet]. [cited 2022 Dec 20]. Available from: https://cytoscape.org/what_is_cytoscape.html
[6] Shannon P, Markiel A, Ozier O, Baliga NS, Wang JT, Ramage D, et al. Cytoscape: A Software Environment for Integrated Models of Biomolecular Interaction Networks. Genome Res. 2003 Jan 11;13(11):2498–504.
[7] Social Media Research Foundation [Internet]. Social Media Research Foundation. [cited Nov 11, 2022]. Available in: https://www.smrfoundation.org/
[8] Smith M a, Rainie L, Shneiderman B, Himelboim I. Mapping Twitter Topic Networks: From Polarized Crowds to Community Clusters [Internet]. Pew Research Center: Internet, Science & Tech. 2014 [cited Nov 11, 2022]. Available in: https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2014/02/20/mapping-twitter-topic-networks-from-polarized-crowds-to-community-clusters/
[9] Ltd © 2020–2022 Graphia Technologies. Graphia [Internet]. Graphia. [cited 2022 Nov 17]. Available from: https://graphia.app/
[10] Freeman TC, Horsewell S, Patir A, Harling-Lee J, Regan T, Shih BB, et al. Graphia: A platform for the graph-based visualisation and analysis of high dimensional data. PLOS Computational Biology. 2022 Jul 25;18(7):e1010310.
[11] Jacomy M, Munk AK. Interfering with the black-box-tradeoff model: Gephisto, a one-click Gephi for critical technical practice. Convergence [Internet]. 2022 Nov 16 [cited 2022 Nov 29]; Available from: https://doi.org/10.1177/13548565221129053
[12] Lab PD. Make a deal with Gephisto [Internet]. Public Data Lab. 2022 [cited 2022 Nov 29]. Available from: https://publicdatalab.org/
[13] Free and Open-Source Tool for Social Network Analysis [Internet]. Social Network Visualizer. [cited 2023 Nov 2]. Available from: https://socnetv.org/
[14] Graphext | Beyond Dashboards, Easier than Notebooks, Predictive Models in a Flash [Internet]. [cited 2023 Nov 2]. Available from: https://www.graphext.com/
[15] VOSviewer — Visualizing scientific landscapes [Internet]. VOSviewer. [cited 2023 Nov 2]. Available from: https://www.vosviewer.com//
[16] Home [Internet]. Graphistry. [cited 2023 Nov 2]. Available from: https://www.graphistry.com/
[17] Retina [Internet]. [cited 2023 Nov 2]. Available from: https://ouestware.gitlab.io/retina/1.0.0-beta.1/
[18] Data Visualization Software [Internet]. [cited 2023 Nov 2]. Available from: https://tulip.labri.fr/site/
[19] Release GraphInsight 1.3.3 · CarloNicolini/GraphInsight [Internet]. GitHub. [cited 2023 Nov 2]. Available from: https://github.com/CarloNicolini/GraphInsight/releases/tag/1.3.3
[20] The Vistorian [Internet]. [cited 2022 Dec 1]. Available from: https://vistorian.net/
[21] Molinero VS, Bach B, Plaisant C, Dufournaud N, Fekete JD. Understanding the Use of The Vistorian: Complementing Logs with Context Mini-Questionnaires.
[22] Cosmograph: Visualize big networks within seconds [Internet]. [cited 2023 Nov 2]. Available from: https://cosmograph.app/
[23] Kumu [Internet]. [cited 2023 Nov 2]. Available from: https://kumu.io/
[24] Ljubljana BL University of. Orange Data Mining [Internet]. Orange Data Mining. [cited 2023 Nov 2]. Available from: https://orangedatamining.com
