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Gephi

Score6 out of 10

17 Reviews and Ratings

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What is Gephi?

Categories & Use Cases

Key Features

Learn about the best (and worst!) features Gephi has to offer, as determined by TrustRadius' reviewers.
Based on 17 ratings of Gephi's features
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Top Performing Features

  • Multi-User Support (named login)

    Named model access means that users have access based on name and password.

    Category average: 8.6

  • Pre-built visualization formats (heatmaps, scatter plots etc.)

    Pre-built visualization formats are canned visualization types that can be selected to visualize different kinds of data.

    Category average: 8.1

  • Customizable dashboards

    Customizable dashboards are dashboards providing the builder some degree of control over the look and feel and display options.

    Category average: 8.5

Areas for Improvement

  • Report sharing and collaboration

    Report sharing and collaboration is the ability to easily share reports with others.

    Category average: 8.5

  • Publish to Web

    Category average: 8.5

  • Report Versioning

    Report versioning is the assignment of version numbers to each version of a report to help in tracking.

    Category average: 8.4

Reviews

What users are saying about Gephi.
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Gephi for local food system social network analysis

Incentivized
Catherine BrinkleyView profile
Assistant Professor and Assistant City and Regional Planner in Research & Development at UC Davis (10,001+ employees employees)

Pros

  • Gephi enables me to create beautiful, publication-ready graphical images.
  • I can write programs to be incorporated in Gephi.
  • The open-source platform provides versatility and the GUI allows easy use.

Cons

  • I wish the geo layout function worked consistently, but I have learned to work around some of the quirks with the layout view.

Other Software Used

ArcGIS

Gephi - For Metrics

Vikas Thotakuri
Research Assistant in Research & Development at University of Nebraska at Omaha (1-10 employees employees)

Pros

  • As far as my experience gephi provides good mathematical results in calculating Metrics
  • Its helpful as we can directly import our data which is in a .csv file
  • Saving the analyzed data to a .csv is a plus. Its easy to run all the metrics by single click
  • We can filter the columns of metrics and we can export only those we need.

Cons

  • Visualization. Not much graphical as of now in Gephi
  • UI can be much improved. Gets confused between different tabs when used after a long gap.

Return on Investment

  • Faster access
  • No Idea about the Business as I am not using it in an organizational level

Gephi - Great Visualization Tool That Could Use Better Export Features

Incentivized
Cory Hefner
Analytics Manager in Marketing at Quaero (51-200 employees employees)

Pros

  • Gephi has a very easy interface to use and get to the tools you need quickly. Without much training or learning, it's pretty simple to figure out.
  • The data import process is very easy in CSV format and the software produces a graph automatically once the correct data is loaded and mapped together (edges and nodes).
  • The visualization is very easy to edit, drag around, and customize. There is flexibility to change the size and color of nodes and edges to represent various characteristics of the graph.

Cons

  • In Gephi, there's really not a great export feature for the map you've created. Screenshots can be taken, but you can't currently export to an image or HTML document.
  • All the interactivity is lost if not using the Gephi file itself. A screenshot does not have nearly the impact as if you could move the edges and nodes around like you can in the software itself.
  • All the text label size is edited by one master control. It would be nice if this would size proportionately with the size of the nodes or if this could be a manual selection at times. With all the edges flowing around, sometimes it's hard to read the text if it's too small or too large.

Gephi - graph visualization's gateway drug

Timothy PerishoView profile
Associate Data Analyst in Research & Development at Infospace (51-200 employees employees)

Pros

  • Gephi's UI, built-in layout, and built-in clustering algorithms make it very easy to get started with (assuming you have some really data and real questions you want answered).
  • Gephi's force atlas layout algorithm and MCL (Louvain) clustering algorithm are both very fast, which I think is crucial for a data visualization tool, because it allows you to play with your data and do intuitive analysis.
  • Gephi's visualization is pretty (and intuitive), which helped me sell the clustering techniques to un-initiated and non-technical managers and executives.
  • Gephi has a pretty large community of support, so when I learn about other clustering algorithms/visualization techniques, it often already exists in a Gephi plug-in.

Cons

  • I (and many others) have had to expand Gephi's memory manually by experimenting with the configuration file. I'm glad it's possible, but it should be easier.
  • Gephi sometimes crashes inexplicably and loses your work, so I have developed a habit of explicitly exporting versions of my graphs as csv's, but I think this should be handled automatically in Gephi.
  • Because it is prone to crash, ideally, Gephi would help the user manage his/her use, by estimating processing and memory for very large tasks and prompting the user to confirm their requests before executing. Instead, I just tend to avoid certain functions.

Usability

Gui-Based Graph Builder That Anyone Can Use

Ben Huntley
Sr. Software Engineer & Data Architect in Information Technology at New England Biolabs (201-500 employees employees)

Pros

  • In comparison to other tools such as GraphWiz or Circos, Gephi comes with an intuitive, easy-to-use interface that makes it easy to load your data, and quickly start building all sorts of different graphs. There's absolutely no code that needs to be written for either loading or modeling. And without downloading additional plug-ins, Gephi ships with quite a few standard graph models, as well as some "fun" extras such as the Sierpinski triangle, and a variety of force atlas types.
  • Most of the layout types (maybe all) are highly configurable, which can make for extremely customized and unique displays of your data. Again, none of this requires the user to write any code. That said, it is possible to script custom functionality for your models, or even update the Java source code yourself, if you feel like getting technical. Gephi builds are available on GitHub, and the developers encourage people to contribute ideas, improvements, and plug-ins.
  • There's a plug-in for Gephi that allows for streaming data to update your model. This essentially allows you to create near realtime graphs of your data in motion. This plug-in was by far the biggest reaston we invested time in the product; to create animated data visualizations without exhaustive hours in development.

Cons

  • At one point, there was an issue with files built in earlier builds not working in newer builds. I typically like to update products as soon as updates are available, but i wound up having to run separate version of Gephi if i wanted to check out what was new. Any models built in prior versions would then have to be recreated in newer versions if I wanted to leverage new features.
  • Documentation; you can never have enough of it. Since much of the product is being built by a variety of contributors, it's hard to document how all the features and plug-ins work. It would be great if the the Gephi team could find a body of resources to manage some sort of global product documentation. There are plenty of 3rd party videos and documents online, however, that do cover some of the specifics.