About

Gephi is an award-winning open source software dedicated to network analysis and visualization, known as the "Photoshop of networks". It has been downloaded more than a million times and is used by scholars and data scientists around the world.


Gephi allows to visualize graph data as a map. State-of-the-art algorithms generate readable layouts where clusters and influential nodes appear. Visual tools tweak colors and shapes to reveal hidden patterns. Gephi helps to explore the details as well as the big picture in the data and to create visualizations that support narratives. Gephi's purpose is to unfold complex data in a way anyone can understand them. More and more network-maps are pictured in online and offline press and other communication media. They spread from science to business, art, and activism. People are increasingly exposed to them and learn how to read them. Gephi aims at accelerating this commoditization process by providing a free and easy way to craft and diffuse network visualizations.


Gephi is built by passionate researchers and engineers under common values. It’s a truly distributed open-source community that started as a student project in the University of Technology of Compiegne, France in 2008 and rapidly grew to the leading software in the field notably thanks to the Google Summer of Code program.


By numbers (as of February 2016):

  • 2M downloads
  • 42 contributors
  • 85 plugin created

Featured applications

“I've used Gephi to show changing brain networks (connected regions) through time from one fMRI scan to the next.”
Dianne Patterson, University of Arizona, Tucson

“We visualized the topic evolution of ~3,000 papers funded by the Framingham Heart Study over the past 60 years to show how the focus of the Study has changed over time.”
Chris Belter, US National Institutes of Health, Washington DC

“Gephi has been instrumental in helping us visualize healthcare stakeholders (physicians, patients, advocacy, media etc.,) communities so we can not only easily analyze the metrics we think are important (size, diversity, connectedness) and adapt our methods but it also enables us to overlay a narrative to these abstract concepts so that our clients can see and understand what is happening in the areas that they care about as well.”
Kayla Rodriguez, MDigitalLife, W2O Group

In the press

VentureBeat (2016)
10 text, sentiment, and social analytics trends for 2016

Forbes (2015)
Who's Connected To Whom In The Global Media?

Wired (2015)
Pro-Government Twitter Bots Try to Hush Mexican Activists

Forbes (2015)
Mapping The Global Flow of Refugees Through News Coverage

Foreign Policy (2013)
The Tehran Connection

The National, Scotland (2015)
Election emotions on Twitter inspire a unique art project

The Washington Post (2015)
The Switch Mapping Twitch’s massive gaming universe

The Atlantic (2015)
The Whole Dysfunctional National Conversation About Guns—on Twitter ... in One Interactive Graph

The Times of Israel (2014)
Gorgeous graphics tell big data stories on Israeli site

The New Yorker (2011)
The Twittering Crowd

Sunlight Foundation (2013)
Untangling the webs of immigration lobbying

BoingBoing (2015)
Which UK MPs rebel against the party, and with whom do they ally?

Ars Technica (2012)
Novel text analysis uses PageRank to identify influential Victorian authors

FT Blog (2015)
Twitter snapshots show Venezuela’s government isolated from its people

Tech Times (2014)
This graphic turns GamerGate’s ugly data into something beautiful

Mediapart (2011)
Blogosphère d’extrême droite : cartographie des réseaux d’influence (French)

In research

Gephi has been cited in more than 1500 publications in various journals, including Nature and Science.