Derive key insights within your data

In recent years, the amount of data generated has catapulted to around 2.5 quintillion bytes each day (1). With so much data at hand, making sense of it all poses a real challenge to organizations. Yet being able to use that data is essential to deriving real business insights and making more informed decisions as a result. By utilizing a JS graph library within your application, you’re able to create rich and customized graph data visualizations for your audience, and enable them to visually navigate data and zero in on the information that’s most relevant. Analyzing your data becomes much less of a daunting task. You’ll be able to unlock new insights that may have previously gone unnoticed.

Building your application

It’s no secret that building an application from scratch is a time-consuming process. Depending on the resources available and the expertise of developers, it can take anywhere from a few hundred to several thousand development hours. Testing and iterating on different ideas can also add to the time and effort needed to build an app that meets your expectations.

With a JS graph library, you can cut down on development time and ease the workload required to develop and integrate network visualization capabilities into your application. JS libraries allow you to test new ideas and expand on existing ones by simply adapting the existing code to your needs.

In addition to this, documentation is often included with JavaScript libraries to help guide developers. Ultimately, by reducing the time it takes to launch an application and the resources required to do so, the time-to-market speed and cost savings can provide a major competitive advantage. This translates to more opportunities to expand on existing projects or explore new endeavors and can positively impact your bottom line.

Easy to use

The ability to make data exploration accessible to your end user is essential in adding value and improving the overall experience of your application. With a JS graph library, you’re able to implement out-of-the-box functions and features that allow your users to more easily interact with their data at scale. Moreover, it’s possible to enrich your visualizations with components that help end users communicate their findings.

If you’re building an app that requires visualizing large amounts of connected data, you may be considering using a JS graph library to help you visualize and interact with your data. A JS graph visualization library can help you effectively visualize and interact with your data, solving common business and technical challenges across industries and organizations.Read on to discover why a JS graph visualization library is the key to meeting your data visualization needs.

3 reasons to use a JavaScript graph visualization library

Ready to start your own graph project?

Discover Ogma, a JavaScript library that can be leveraged to develop powerful, large-scale interactive graph visualizations.

To achieve greater software intelligence, CAST needed a solution that could handle the complexities of today’s modern software systems in terms of both volume and performance. Leveraging Ogma, an all-in-one JavaScript library for large-scale graph visualizations, helped them to achieve this much faster and with greater ease.

By leveraging graph technology, mapping different software dependencies becomes much easier and faster to use and gain real insights from. It provides a powerful and flexible way to model, analyze, and visualize complex relationships between software components. In fact, one CAST client even noted that what once was taking 3-4 days to accomplish could now be done in just 3-4 hours.

CAST: achieving greater software intelligence with graph visualization

CAST provides products that generate software intelligence, with a technology based on semantic analysis of software source code and components. Their technology automatically “understands” custom-built software systems and provides insights into their inner workings with MRI-like precision.

Discover how CAST added graph visualization capabilities to their solution

Case Study

We’ve selected 12 of the most popular JavaScript graph visualization libraries. Below you’ll find essential information about each one, including information on integration, ability to handle large graphs, interactive features, and more. This list is broken down into three main categories: commercial libraries, general purpose libraries, and specialized open source libraries.

Commercial JavaScript libraries

Commercial libraries offer the most extensive features and options, not to mention superior documentation and support. Because they come with a cost, they may not be well adapted for some projects.

GoJS

This is a JavaScript / TypeScript library used for building interactive graphs and diagrams. It includes several built-in layouts and extensible tools, and is compatible with multiple frameworks including React, Angular, and Vue.js. GoJS only has Canvas and SVG rendering.

Ogma

This JavaScript graph visualization library leverages WebGL rendering and is a powerful solution to develop large-scale interactive graph visualizations. It features many layout algorithms, geo-mode, annotation layers, visual groupings, numerous styling options, and comes with many examples and templates. Ogma supports multiple integration frameworks for maximum flexibility.

Keylines

This graph visualization engine supports canvas and WebGL rendering. It supports many graph algorithms and offers many different layouts. Keylines only supports the React framework for integration.

yFiles

Developed by yWorks, this library enables you to visualize any kind of graph, diagram, or network. It supports a wide range of desktop and web technologies, as well as many layout algorithms. yFiles also has a large features set and many extensibility options. There are several options to integrate yFiles with your application including Angular and React.

General JavaScript libraries

General libraries can be adapted for many graph visualization use cases. These free libraries may be less powerful than their commercial counterparts, however, or lack integration options, requiring a bigger time investment.

D3

The JS library is an especially popular one. It is used to manipulate documents based on data using HTML, SVG, and CSS. However, using it to build a graph visualization solution is highly time consuming. There is no set integration framework so you have to build one yourself and render all behaviors, requiring a large time investment..

Vega.js

This is a framework built on top of D3 used for creating interactive visualization designs. Specifications are written in JSON files instead of in JavaScript. Development of Vega.js is led by the University of Washington Interactive Data Lab, and the library is released under a BSD-3 license.

Vis.js

This browser-based library is under the MIT license. It works with large, dynamic datasets. Vis.js offers common customization options for styling nodes, labels, animations, and more. The layouts and algorithms are limited, however, and it’s difficult to customize the library beyond what is already offered.

G6

This is a canvas-based graph visualization framework that integrates with React via its sister library Graphin. It’s well adapted for visualizing small to moderate sized graphs. G6 provides many algorithms and styling options. The implementations and API can be tricky, however, and parts of the documentation are in Chinese.

Specialized open source JavaScript libraries

Open source libraries are available for anyone to use for free. Some may come with certain limitations or steep learning curves.

Sigma.js

This JS library is developed and maintained by the Media Lab at Sciences Po, and has been released under the MIT license. Developers can use it to publish network and graph visualizations on web pages, as well as to integrate network exploration into web applications. Sigma.js can be integrated with React applications.

Next Step

Choosing a JS graph library

If you’re starting to dive deeper into your decision making process, we’ve also put together a list of some of the most popular JS graph libraries to visualize your graph data. It’s a good place to start for a high-level comparison of graph libraries. We also wrote a starter guide for developers on JS graph libraries for network visualization.

You can also check out Ogma, the all in one JS graph visualization library from Linkurious for large-scale, interactive graph visualization.

Scroll to discover the top 12 JS graph libraries to visualize your graph data

Visualizing data helps us better understand how processes work and how they connect with each other. JavaScript graph library solutions are a great way to visualize data as graphs in an intuitive manner. With a wide range of JavaScript graph libraries available on the market, developers have a great pool of readily accessible tools to visualize their data as a graph. Whether you're looking for commercial solutions, open source options, or more specialized libraries, you'll be sure to find what you need. 

Ready to launch your project? Our own JS graph library, Ogma, comes equipped with everything you need to easily visualize and analyze your graph data and increase your productivity across the board. Ogma leverages WebGL rendering, a modular architecture and state-of-the-art layout algorithms to make the visualization of large graphs not only possible, but powerful. Experience for yourself just how much this library can do for your project.