Avogadro is an advanced molecular editor designed for cross-platform use in computational chemistry, molecular modeling, education, bioinformatics, materials science, and related areas. It offers flexible rendering and a powerful plugin architecture.
Core features and goals of the Avogadro project include:
- Open-source, distributed under the liberal 3-clause BSD license
- Cross-platform, with builds on Linux, Mac OS X and Windows
- An intuitive interface designed to be useful to the whole community
- Fast and efficient, embracing the latest technologies
- Extensible, making extensive use of a plugin architecture
- Flexible, supporting a range of chemical data formats and packages
Avogadro 2 began as a rewrite of the original Avogadro 1.x, which is now unsupported. The successor is faster, better, much more stable, and more featureful. A final couple of features yet to be ported will be implemented by the time of the 2.0 release, but in the meantime Avogadro 2 already has much new functionality of its own.
Avogadro's codebase is split across a libraries repository and an application repository. The new code architecture provides a high-performance rendering engine, modern code development, and significantly improved speed and stability.
Avogadro is being developed as part of the Open Chemistry project by an open community, which was started at Kitware as an open-source community project.
For the most up-to-date experience use the nightly builds prepared by GitHub actions for:
We also maintain a
beta Flatpak
for Linux that is updated with the lastest changes every week or two.
For full releases and an overview of all available ways to obtain Avogadro see the overview on the Avogadro website.
Binaries and the source code for each release can be found on the GitHub releases page.
If you would like to build from source we recommend that you follow our build guide.
Our user documentation can be found on the Avogadro website, as well as a brief guide to getting started.
We welcome all kinds of contributions as a community project, from bug reports, feature suggestions, language translations, Python plugins, and C++ code development.
Our project uses the standard GitHub pull request process for code review and integration. Please check our contribution guide for more details on developing and contributing to the project. The GitHub issue tracker can be used to report bugs, make feature requests, etc. Our API is documented online with updated documentation generated nightly.
To introduce yourself, ask for help, or general discussion, we welcome everyone to our forum
Contributors Hall of Fame:
