Kumu vs Polinode

Kumu organizes complex data into relationship maps connecting people, systems, and concepts. It supports stakeholder, systems, social network, community asset, and concept mapping. Users can build maps by hand or import spreadsheet data, including live data from Google Sheets. Built-in analysis includes closeness, betweenness, and eigenvector centrality, plus automated community detection and clustering. Kumu also provides a presentation builder and lets users embed interactive maps on websites. It is available on the web and as self-hosted software, and the maker describes it as a tool for organizations working with complex relationships and systems, including social-sector leaders seeking to create impact. The free Basic workspace includes unlimited public projects, collaborators, maps, and views, but public projects are visible to everyone and indexed by search engines. Private projects require payment or an eligible student discount; a two-week trial of private projects is available. A private project costs $9/month per project. The Pro workspace costs $10/month per workspace, with private projects priced separately. Enterprise is billed annually per user, with self-hosted or managed cloud options, SAML single sign-on, priority support, and a 99.95% uptime SLA.

Polinode is a browser-based tool for organizational network analysis and visualization. It can work with network data imported from Excel, GEXF, or JSON, gathered through relationship surveys, or accessed through passive data queries. Surveys can collect relationship information along with demographic, engagement, culture, and open-text responses. Its visualizations support networks of up to 50,000 nodes and 250,000 edges, with more than 30 metrics. An AI network chat can answer questions about network data, calculate metrics, interpret results, and find shortest paths. Passive integrations cover metadata from Office 365, Microsoft Teams, Google Workspace, and Slack. Polinode says these integrations do not read or store message content, refresh every 24 hours, and require an organization account. Free accounts have no private networks; Lite allows five and costs $40 a month, while Professional allows 50 and costs $80 a month. Polinode says it is SOC 2 certified and encrypts stored data with AES-256 and transmitted data with SSL/TLS.