Cytoscape.js

About Cytoscape.js

Cytoscape.js is an open-source JavaScript library for graph theory (network) visualization and analysis, created at the University of Toronto's Donnelly Centre and published in Oxford Bioinformatics. It renders interactive graphs in the browser using stylesheets to separate presentation from data, layouts for automatic or manual node positioning, and selectors for filtering and querying graph elements. It supports standard touch and desktop gestures such as pinch-to-zoom, box selection, and panning, and can run headlessly on Node.js for server-side or terminal-based graph analysis. Graphs are fully serializable and deserializable via JSON, and the library includes built-in graph theory algorithms such as BFS and PageRank.

The library is written in pure JS with no external dependencies, is compatible with all modern browsers as well as legacy browsers with ES5 and canvas support, and is distributed under the MIT license for the core library and its first-party extensions. It is available through npm, yarn, bower, and jspm, and supports ES modules, UMD, CommonJS/Node.js, globals, and AMD/Require.js module systems. It also has bindings for the R language via RCyjs and can render graph images on Node.js through Cytosnap.

Cytoscape.js is used in both commercial and open-source projects, and is designed for both front-facing application use cases and developer use cases involving graph analysis. It is used by organizations including Amazon, Google, IBM, Microsoft, Meta, Cisco, and research institutions and bioinformatics resources such as Ensembl, FlyBase, and the Gene Ontology Consortium. The project maintains a weekly patch and monthly feature release cadence and is listed by Zenodo for per-version DOIs.

Key features

• Interactive graph visualisation and analysis with layouts, styling, and selectors
• Graph theory algorithms including BFS and PageRank
• Touch and desktop gesture support out-of-the-box (pinch-to-zoom, box selection, panning)
• Headless usage on Node.js for server-side graph analysis and image rendering via Cytosnap
• Fully serialisable/deserialisable via JSON with extensible plugin architecture
• Runs in all modern browsers and legacy browsers with ES5 and canvas support

Frequently asked questions