Introduction

BioNodulo Documentation

Welcome to the BioNodulo documentation. BioNodulo is a node-based workflow platform for bioinformatics — visually build and execute computational biology pipelines by connecting nodes that represent bioinformatics tools.

What is BioNodulo?

BioNodulo provides a visual, drag-and-drop interface where researchers construct computational pipelines by connecting nodes representing bioinformatics tools (BWA, GATK, FastQC, Cell Ranger, and more). Workflows execute on cloud infrastructure optimized for RAM-intensive, long-running genomic analyses.

If you have ever used ComfyUI for image generation, the model will feel familiar: BioNodulo is “ComfyUI for bioinformatics.” Instead of wiring together diffusion samplers and VAEs, you wire together aligners, variant callers, and quality-control tools — and instead of running for seconds on a GPU, your graphs can run for hours or days on large-memory CPU instances.

Open Core Model

  • Desktop Application — Free, open-source (GPL-3), runs locally on your own machine. The full node editor and execution engine, no account required.
  • Cloud Platform — Scalable compute, team collaboration, AI features, and credit-based execution billing. Editing is always free; you only pay when you run.
  • Node Registry — Community-contributed bioinformatics nodes, packaged and versioned so workflows stay reproducible.

Why node-based?

  • Reproducibility. A workflow is a JSON document. Share it, version it, and re-run it months later with identical results.
  • Transparency. Every parameter of every tool is visible on the canvas — no hidden shell scripts.
  • Composability. Connect the output of one tool to the input of another by dragging an edge; the platform validates that the data types are compatible.
  • Scale on demand. Run a small test locally on your desktop, then execute the same graph against a 256 GB cloud instance without changing a thing.

Choose your path

You want to…Start here
Understand the productIntroduction
Run locally, no accountDesktop Installation
Run in the cloud in minutesCloud Quickstart
Build your first pipelineYour First Workflow
Learn how nodes, edges and runs workCore Concepts
Look up a specific toolNode Reference
Integrate via the APIAPI Reference
Contribute a nodeCreating Custom Nodes

Getting Help