GROMACS alternatives

3 tools to consider instead of GROMACS, shown against it.

GROMACS LAMMPS Materials Project ROOT
Vendor GROMACS development team (academic consortium) Sandia National Laboratories (US DOE) Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (US DOE) CERN
Pricing model Open source + paid options Open source + paid options Free Open source + paid options
Free tier Yes Yes Yes Yes
Deployment Self-hosted Self-hosted Cloud Self-hosted
Open source Yes (LGPL-2.1) Yes (GPL-2.0) No Yes (LGPL-2.1)
Best for Structural biologists and biophysicists simulating proteins, membranes and other biomolecules at speed. Computational materials scientists and chemists running large-scale atomistic molecular dynamics simulations. Materials scientists screening candidate compounds computationally before lab synthesis. Particle and nuclear physicists processing and analyzing very large experimental event datasets.
Pricing

Free and open source; maintained by an academic development consortium.

Pricing has not been verified yet — see the vendor's site.

Free and open source; developed with US Department of Energy funding.

Pricing has not been verified yet — see the vendor's site.

Free with API key registration; funded by the US Department of Energy.

Pricing has not been verified yet — see the vendor's site.

Free and open source; developed and maintained by CERN.

Pricing has not been verified yet — see the vendor's site.

Features
  • Biomolecular molecular dynamics simulation
  • CPU/GPU-accelerated performance
  • Built-in trajectory analysis tools
  • Wide biomolecular force field support
  • Scales from workstation to HPC cluster
  • Free energy calculation methods
  • Active academic development community
  • Classical molecular dynamics simulation
  • MPI and GPU parallelization for HPC scale
  • Wide range of interatomic potentials/force fields
  • Extensible via custom C++ packages
  • Scriptable plain-text input files
  • Supports solids, liquids, polymers and biomolecules
  • Active research-community contributions
  • 150,000+ computed material property records
  • DFT-derived electronic and structural data
  • Web-based structure and property search
  • Python API (pymatgen/MP API)
  • Phase diagram and stability analysis
  • Battery and catalyst screening tools
  • Free registration-based access
  • Columnar TTree data format for large event datasets
  • C++ and Python (PyROOT) interfaces
  • Statistical fitting and analysis libraries
  • 2D/3D histogramming and visualization
  • RDataFrame for parallel data processing
  • Used by major LHC experiment software stacks
  • Cross-platform (Linux, macOS, Windows)

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