Polinode vs VOSviewer

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.

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.