Gephi is an interactive visualization and exploration platform for all kinds of networks and complex systems, dynamic and hierarchical graphs. It runs on Windows, Linux and Mac OS X. Gephi is open-source and free. It was one of the projects selected by The Google Summer of Code in 2010 and 2011.

Gephi is very easy to use and provides you with almost all the metrics you need on graphs. It works best with medium-sized networks up to 3000-5000 nodes and 10000-20000 edges, but eventually it depends on your computer configuration and speed. The easiest way to try how it works is to download some sample data from Gephi’s forum and follow the steps outlined in their 5-minute tutorial. For more complex tasks you can see our posts and whitepapers on Facebook network analysis using netvizz and Gephi, as well as text network analysis using Gephi.

Originally developed by WebAtlas team in France by Bastian, Heyman and Jacomy (see their 2009 whitepaper on Gephi). Nowadays many more people and developers joined in to form the non-for-profit Gephi Consortium with the HQ at SciencePo school in France. Nodus Labs is the associate member of Gephi Consortium and we regularly host Gephi meetup events in Berlin, where we demonstrate how Gephi can be used to analyze and visualize text, knowledge, and social networks. We also promote the artistic use of Gephi collaborating with several visual and performance artists as a part of our research into how network science can advance artistic practice.