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Most humans can't make much sense of anything more than 50-100 node graph at a time. At a graph size of containing 50-100 nodes or lesser which is a rather small graph, huge variety of graph algorithms are not very helpful. These libraries are good to experiment with each layout algorithm but ultimately a graph analysis most of the time involves exploration and querying, like a repl and making sense of that. Most frontend js libraries will not be helpful in doing that.

It's a surprise that there is no robust backend library that does graph layout.




You can run d3 on the backend with node. It shouldn't be too difficult using it with a layout to constrain the potential visualization to a more comprehensible data set.

There's even a d3-node package available to generate a static SVG or png.

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Additionally, grouping or binning the data may be something to consider when dealing with a visualization with 100+ nodes. Never tried that with DAG datasets, not sure how that would work, but it's interesting to think about.


Graphviz can easily be used as a backend layout system to output SVG or PNG. It's just not very interactive; you can do mouseover annotations but you can't drag nodes around.




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