Gephi Lite v1.0

2 hours ago 1

The summer has been quite busy, and we are very thrilled to announce the release of Gephi Lite v1.0! This marks for us the first version of Gephi Lite we are really proud about.

You can play with it at lite.gephi.org 🚀

Previously, on Gephi Lite…

Since Gephi’s creation in 2008, multiple groups of people within the Gephi community conceived and developed various web applications¹ to somehow extend Gephi to the web. Some of these projects were designed to help people publish or share their networks online somehow, while others were meant to bring some of Gephi’s core features to the web (layout, filters, nodes coloring)².

Starting the Project

During 2022 Gephi Week in Paris, the Gephi team decided to endorse Gephi Lite as a new project, within the Gephi ecosystem. This new web application would be developed by the OuestWare team, who was already carrying other open-source graph visualization tools close to the Gephi ecosystem, such as sigma.js or Retina.

▲ A timeline of Gephi Lite activity, from our recent presentation at DH2025

From 2022 to 2025, the team worked on Gephi Lite. It quickly became a usable prototype, and found its place within the Gephi community. Dr. Veronica Espinoza wrote a tutorial on her blog on how to display node images in Gephi Lite, for instance. Also, Gephi Lite was used twice as an experimental playground to test new things:

Mathieu Jacomy’s connected-closeness layout evaluation metric was added to Gephi Lite in Gephi Week 2024;
A team of people (Mathieu Jacomy, Alexis Jacomy, Guillaume Plique, Benjamin Ooghe-Tabanou, Andrea Benedetti and Tommaso Elli) met at a workshop in Paris in December 2024 to design a new way to observe uncertainty in the Louvain Method – prototyped in Gephi Lite.

Some important limitations

But in early 2025, there were some big issues to tackle:

Gephi Lite’s design was a bit to chaotic and incoherent
Gephi Lite was mostly used by its developers
Nobody actually knew who was using Gephi Lite, nor why do people use it (or don’t)

▲ The team behind Gephi Lite v1.0: Benoit, Arthur, Alexis and Paul

So, OuestWare hired an intern designer, Arthur Desaintjan, who spent some months on leading user interviews and redesigning Gephi Lite entirely. The full OuestWare team then basically spent the summer implementing these new designs.³

The current state

Basically, what’s new is:

Gephi Lite has a new graphical identity, cleaner, with more space for the data
Navigation has been revamped, so that features appear more clearly
Gephi Lite now has a fresh new data table

▲ The fresh new data table in action!

Gephi Lite for newcomers

So, what’s this all about? Gephi Lite is a lighter , web-based version of Gephi.

Gephi Lite is Gephi

▲ The new logos to differentiate Gephi from Gephi Lite

This one is really about what makes Gephi Gephi: Gephi Lite is Gephi, because:

It serves the same purpose (visual network analysis)
It’s from the same community (just not the exact same people)
Its interface keeps the same blocks (filter, layout, appearance…)

Gephi Lite is light 🪶

Gephi Lite is light, or at least lighter than the well known Gephi desktop application, because:

It does not need to be installed (it’s just a webpage, available to anyone with some internet connection and a Web browser)
Its user interface is lighter (complex features are simplified or removed)
It only supports lighter graphs 🥲 (no more than 10k nodes or 20k edges, at the moment)

Gephi Lite is a web application

Gephi Lite is a web application, which opens a lot of opportunities!

“Open in Gephi Lite” permalinks, or a way to share Gephi graphs as if they were actual web documents
Gephi Lite iframes, or a way to embed Gephi Lite directly inside web pages or web applications
Gephi Lite everywhere, or at least on every device with modern web browsers (and that includes tablets and mobiles)

▲ Slightly edited from Metaphors We Web By

What’s Next

Now, Gephi Lite v1.0 is a very important milestone for us, but there are still clear ways to improve the project.

Gephi Viewer

The quite popular SigmaExporter plugin for Gephi is quite dated now, especially since it is based on a 10+ years old version of sigma.js.

In Gephi Week 2022, Clément Levallois and Alexis Jacomy developed WebPublishPlugin, a new plugin to publish graphs online using Retina. But there are various issues with using Retina as the “official” Gephi web-based graph viewer:

Retina does things in its own way: It is not “just a viewer”. It preprocesses some layout when there is none, it allows filtering, changing appearance on the fly…
Despite being developed by the same people as Gephi Lite, it has been designed outside Gephi ecosystem, with features prioritization driven by various OuestWare’s projects.

▲ A screenshot of Retina, or what could a Gephi Viewer look like

So, latest 2025 Gephi Week in Nantes was the opportunity to challenge what an “official Gephi Viewer” should be, and basically:

It should share as much code with Gephi Lite as possible – to make maintaining both applications as simple as possible;
It should focus on displaying a graph with a specific appearance, but with zooming / panning / searching capabilities;
It should provide a proper caption, as does Gephi Lite.

Performance

Recent efforts on Gephi Lite were exclusively focused on features, stability and usability. But there are many ways to improve its performances:

GPU-based force directed layout algorithms, like in Cosmograph
Web-worker based heavy computations (rather than freezing the browser’s rendering thread)
Additional “quick-wins” to ease using Gephi Lite with larger networks (toggle graph rendering while running ForceAtlas2, for instance)

Upcoming Features

There are also various feature opportunities that were out of scope, but remain very interesting:

Support for background map layers for spatial network context (already supported in sigma.js, which Gephi Lite is based on);
Better palettes and colors management (allowing to switch between base or user-defined palettes, etc…)
Better export paths (upcoming Gephi Viewer export, SVG export, caption display in PNG export…)

We hope you will like Gephi Lite v1.0. We can’t wait to hear feedback from the community: please let us know what you think!

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