GUI viewers for HDF5 / NetCDF4 data

HDF5 is a popular data container format, a filesystem within a file. Many programs supporting HDF5 like Matlab can read and plot data. It is useful to have a standalone simple data browser like HDFview.

HDFview is from the HDF Group and can read HDF5, NetCDF4, and FITS. HDFview enables editing (writing) as well as reading HDF5. One can simply download the HDFview binaries, or use package managers:

  • Linux: apt install hdfview
  • macOS: brew install hdfview

ViTables is a Python-based HDF5 GUI.


The Java-based PanoplyJ is available for macOS, Linux and Windows.