A Sourcetrail alternative for today's stacks.
Sourcetrail showed a graph of your code next to the source, offline, on your own machine. Its authors archived it in 2021. Nodeway is a free desktop app built on the same idea, for TypeScript, Python, Go, Rust and more.
What happened to Sourcetrail
Sourcetrail was a source explorer for C, C++, Java and Python. Coati Software released it as open source under the GPL in November 2019, then archived the project at the end of 2021. The code is still available, and community forks such as petermost/Sourcetrail keep it building on current systems.
What people miss is the way of working: search for a symbol, see what it connects to, and read the code without losing the picture. Very few tools since have put those three things in one window.
What carries over
- A graph and the source side by side. Select a node and its code opens beside the map.
- One search across the whole codebase: files, functions, components, routes and tables.
- Everything runs locally. Your code is analysed on your computer and never uploaded, and the app works offline.
How they differ
| Sourcetrail | Nodeway | |
|---|---|---|
| Languages | C, C++, Java and Python | TypeScript, JavaScript, Python, Go, Rust, Java, C#, C and C++, Ruby, PHP and Shell |
| Setup | A project per codebase. C and C++ need the build configuration, such as a compilation database | Open a folder. No build setup |
| Web apps | Not covered | Finds routes in 13 frameworks and tables from 8 ORMs, and traces a request from route to table |
| AI | None | Optional. Ask questions with your own key, or with Ollama on your own machine |
| Platforms | Windows, macOS and Linux | macOS (Apple silicon) and Windows |
| Price | Free and open source | Free |
| Status | Archived in 2021, continued by community forks | Actively developed |
When a Sourcetrail fork is the better choice
Nodeway is not a drop-in replacement for every Sourcetrail user, and it is better to say so plainly.
- Sourcetrail indexed C and C++ with the compiler, so templates, macros and overloads resolve exactly. Nodeway reads C and C++ from the syntax tree, which is fast and needs no setup but is less exact. For a large C++ codebase where that precision matters, a maintained fork is the better fit.
- Nodeway has no Linux build yet.
Nodeway is the better fit when your code is a web application or a service, when the repository mixes languages, or when you want a map without configuring a build first.
What Nodeway adds
- Request tracing: follow a route hop by hop to the tables it reads and writes.
- Database tables on the same map as the code that uses them.
- Branch review: see what a branch changes, highlighted on the map.
- A 3D view of the same graph for seeing the shape of a whole repository.
Getting started
Download Nodeway and open the folder that holds your repository. Most repositories are mapped in under a minute, and each map is cached per commit. If the codebase is new to you, see the guide on how to understand a large codebase.