PyMOL Alternatives

PyMOL is described as 'Powerful and comprehensive molecular visualization product for rendering and animating 3D molecular structures' and is an app in the education & reference category. There are more than 10 alternatives to PyMOL for a variety of platforms, including Mac, Windows, Linux, Web-based and Android apps. The best PyMOL alternative is Avogadro, which is both free and Open Source. Other great apps like PyMOL are UCSF Chimera, Calistry.org, Jmol and Rasmol.

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Alternatives
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Alternatives list

  1. Avogadro icon
     15 likes

    Avogadro is an advanced molecule editor and visualizer designed for cross-platform use in computational chemistry, molecular modeling, bioinformatics, materials science, and related areas.

    22 Avogadro alternatives

    Cost / License

    Platforms

    • Mac
    • Windows
    • Linux
    Good alternative?
     
  2. UCSF Chimera icon
     3 likes

    UCSF Chimera is a highly extensible program for interactive visualization and analysis of molecular structures and related data.

    Cost / License

    • Free
    • Proprietary

    Platforms

    • Mac
    • Windows
    • Linux
    Good alternative?
     
  3. Calistry.org icon
     6 likes

    Calistry is an online Chemistry Calculator. Till date Calistry contains 70+ calculators in the field of Chemistry. Everything in the website is entirely free to use. Other than calculators, Calistry also provides online molecular viewers that visualizes coordinate file of...

    Cost / License

    • Free
    • Proprietary

    Application type

    Platforms

    • Online
    • Android
    Good alternative?
     
  4. Jmol icon
     3 likes

    Jmol is a free, open source molecule viewer for students, educators, and researchers in chemistry and biochemistry. It is cross-platform, running on Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux/Unix systems.

    Cost / License

    • Free
    • Open Source

    Platforms

    • Mac
    • Windows
    • Linux
    Good alternative?
     
  5. Rasmol icon
     2 likes

    RasMol is a computer program written for molecular graphics visualization intended and used primarily for the depiction and exploration of biological macromolecule structures, such as those found in the Protein Data Bank.

    Cost / License

    • Free
    • Open Source

    Platforms

    • Mac
    • Windows
    • Linux
    Good alternative?
     
  6. QuteMol icon
     1 like

    QuteMol is an open source (GPL), interactive, high quality molecular visualization system. QuteMol exploits the current GPU capabilites through OpenGL shaders to offers an array of innovative visual effects.

    Cost / License

    • Free
    • Proprietary

    Platforms

    • Mac
    • Windows
    Good alternative?
     
  7. VMD is a molecular visualization program for displaying, animating, and analyzing large biomolecular systems using 3-D graphics and built-in scripting.

    Cost / License

    • Free
    • Open Source

    Platforms

    • Mac
    • Windows
    • Linux
    Good alternative?
     
  8. ChimeraX icon
     1 like

    UCSF ChimeraX (or simply ChimeraX) is the next-generation molecular visualization program from the Resource for Biocomputing, Visualization, and Informatics (RBVI), following UCSF Chimera. ChimeraX can be downloaded free of charge for academic, government, nonprofit, and...

    Cost / License

    • Free Personal
    • Proprietary

    Platforms

    • Mac
    • Windows
    • Linux
    Good alternative?
     
  9. CellWalk icon
     Like

    Explore detailed 3D cell biology down to the molecular level, or tour life’s molecular machines. CellWalk is a beautiful new way for students to learn biology.

    Cost / License

    • Freemium
    • Proprietary

    Platforms

    • iPhone
    • iPad
    • visionOS
    Good alternative?
     
  10. Jalview icon
     Like

    Jalview is a free cross-platform program for multiple sequence alignment editing, visualisation and analysis. Use it to align, view and edit sequence alignments, analyse them with phylogenetic trees and principal components analysis (PCA) plots and explore molecular structures...

    Cost / License

    Platforms

    • Mac
    • Windows
    • Linux
    Good alternative?
     
  11. RasTop icon
     Like

    RasTop is a molecular visualization software adapted from the program RasMol, which was initially developed by Roger Sayle. RasTop is particularly adapted for educational purposes and for the rapid analysis of macromolecules at the bench.

    Cost / License

    • Free
    • Open Source

    Platforms

    • Mac
    • Windows
    • Linux
    • Wine
    Good alternative?
     
  12. Vipster icon
     Like

    Vipster is a powerful and versatile tool for pre- and post-processing of periodic chemical structures. It's designed from the ground up with periodic simulations in mind.

    Cost / License

    Platforms

    • Linux
    • Flathub
    • Flatpak
    • Windows
    • Mac
    • Self-Hosted
    Good alternative?
     
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