Kumu vs VOSviewer

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.

VOSviewer constructs and visualizes bibliometric networks, including networks of terms found together in scientific literature. It supports networks based on citation, bibliographic coupling, co-citation and co-authorship, drawing on sources including Web of Science, Scopus, Dimensions, Lens, PubMed, Crossref, Europe PMC, OpenAlex, Semantic Scholar, OpenCitations and WikiData. Analysis tools include network layout and clustering, English-language text mining, fractional counting and thesaurus-based data cleaning. Visualizations include density and overlay views, with zooming and scrolling; high-resolution screenshots can be saved as bitmap or vector files. VOSviewer Online runs in a browser, opens JSON and map and network files, and shares visualizations through links, QR codes or embeddable HTML. The stand-alone version can share through Google Drive, Microsoft OneDrive and Dropbox. The software is available for Windows, macOS, Linux and the web; the download page also offers a JAR version for other systems. Running it requires Java 8 or higher. The maker describes its analyses as useful to research institutions and research funders. VOSviewer can be used freely for any purpose.