Graphviz vs PyGraphViz

Question

There are some dot files  that I need to read in Python and extract some values from the nodes to populate my data structure. I see there are two graphviz packages for Python: graphviz and pygraphviz. Is there any big difference between the two? They seem pretty similar but are there any such differences?

Answer 1

graphviz is lightweight library which calls graphviz as subprocess to execute all actions and produce output. This library is great for quick and easy producing SVG or PNG output.

pygraphviz is complete C bindings which uses graphviz as library and expose all graphviz internal functionality like add/remove nodes/edges. But it comes with higher complexity in deployment as pip needs to compile C bindings and find all libraries.