Unity Graph Toolkit Update (Q1 2025)

Unity Engine
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Edit - GRAPH TOOLKIT IS OUT NOW as an experimental package, learn more here: Unity’s Graph Toolkit (Experimental), AVAILABLE TODAY in Unity 6.2!

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Hello Unity community!

We are excited to announce the upcoming experimental package release of Graph Toolkit, a graph authoring framework designed to help you build custom node-based tools more easily and efficiently. This toolkit provides all the front-end elements and behaviors you need ready out-of-the-box, while remaining flexible enough to adapt to your project’s unique requirements.

A few years ago, many of you discovered this package in its early stages as Graph Tools Foundation (GTF) and shared your valuable feedback. After careful evaluation of your input, combined with internal considerations, we have decided to release it as a standalone package. At its core, this framework is designed to empower extensibility for Unity users, and releasing it as a package ensures maximum flexibility for developers.

Looking ahead, Graph Toolkit represents a major step in our long-term vision of creating a standardized foundation for all Unity graph tools. Beginning with the new animation system, we aim to bring more consistency and unification across all our graph-based offerings.

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Why use Graph Toolkit?

Custom graph tools are often a key part of building efficient pipelines for your project. While asset store solutions can be helpful, sometimes the best path forward is to create a lightweight tool tailored specifically to your needs. We’ve done the heavy lifting so you can focus on building solutions, not infrastructure.

Let’s take a closer look at what makes this package a valuable addition to your development toolkit!

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:hammer_and_wrench: Custom Node Solutions Made Easy :hammer_and_wrench:

The framework is built on a powerful architecture that supports a variety of graph types while maintaining excellent scalability and flexibility. The front-end of your graph could be built in less than a day, and creating Node UI can be done in minutes with just a few lines of code.

Nodes
Nodes2383×1323 396 KB

To set clear expectations, we want to emphasize that this is a front-end graph authoring solution, it does not provide the backend execution for your graph tools. It is also editor-only, which means that it cannot run in game or application builds.

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:stopwatch: Spend More Time Creating :stopwatch:

With feature-rich, out-of-the-box functionality, this toolkit equips you with everything you need to create intuitive graph tools quickly and efficiently. It includes built-in basics such as serialization, support for Undo/Redo, Copy/Paste, and more.

Here is an example of one of the many features we offer: Subgraphs. We support both local and asset subgraphs, and provide a clean and easy conversion between both.

Subgraph2

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:light_bulb: Intuitive by Design :light_bulb:

This toolkit was designed with usability and end users in mind, while fully aligned with Unity UI/UX standards. Any graph tool you create will be polished, intuitive, and streamlined with built-in workflow accelerators right from the start.

UX2

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What’s Next?

Graph Toolkit will be available soon, and we cannot wait to see what you build with it! What we’ve shared are just the highlights of the package - details and functionality may continue to evolve as we finalize the product.

We will share more updates as we get closer to an experimental release, so stay tuned for more details on exact dates and examples showcasing what this framework is capable of. In the meantime, we welcome your questions and thoughts in the comments below!

Sincerely,

Anita H.
Lead Product Designer, Graph Toolkit

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Edit: Q2 update posted - Unity Graph Toolkit Update (Q2 2025)

79 Likes
Unity Graph Toolkit Update (Q2 2025)
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Is this also included behaviour package?

4 Likes
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I’m really excited about this! :grin:

I recently tried GraphView to learn and prototype while waiting for the new tool.
What differences can we expect in terms of API?

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This looks fantastic! Congrats to the whole team that worked on this. I believe this will truly be a game changer for tooling.

3 Likes
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Looks amazing, but when you say “Editor only” you mean only the node-building part, right?
Can I use logic from the graph at runtime (like visual scripting or as FSM)?
And if so, what about performance?
Can I run the graph each frame without fear of allocating kilobytes of GC?
Will this require some kind of baking process (like SG bakes to .shader)?

2 Likes
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I think this is pretty optimized since they are using it for the new Animation System

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I’ve been waiting for this a very long time. Glad to see it coming to Unity. From details shared looks great and I’ll definitely participate in testing the experimental releases.

5 Likes
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Hi. Thank you for your question.
Editor-only means that if you want to build a VisualScripting-like tool, you’ll need to build your own runtime and convert the authoring data (coming from Graph Toolkit) to runtime data.

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Hi Paul! Thanks for your interest in the toolkit :grinning_face_with_smiling_eyes: We are working on a more comprehensive comparison of GraphView vs. GTK for our next forum update post. If you have any specific questions please let us know so we can make sure to address it then!

5 Likes
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Thanks for the quick reply!

The first things I think of are:

  • Bidirectional ports.
  • Custom visuals for edges depending on the port.
  • Properties on edges themselves.
  • Custom containers (like blocks in VFX graph, but different from the one by default).
  • Custom overlays (like simulation zones in Blender).
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Hi. I have some questions regarding this statement. Does Graph Tool APIs support Burst by default that I could integrate with DOTS easily without requiring to do extra work just to make Burst working. For backend execution for your graph tools are u refer to DFG? I would like to when official will release DFG and I believe now DFG codebase is 100% bursted code? Furthermore, I wish official can bring it beyond editor-only. It’s also incredibly useful make it working at game runtime that able to debugging directly at game runtime without requiring to attach game runtime process into Unity editor.

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I’m not sure how viable this is but I’d like to have the ability to color edges and nodes/node outlines in real time for debugging purposes. For reference, see how Visual Scripting package nodes are visualized in Play mode.

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I’ve been literally waiting for this since 2018, working with the old GraphView, revisiting the same 3 GTF threads over and over… I am now old but I am still alive!

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looks awesome, wish there was a runtime version too

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Is there any page with roadmap or progress updates?
Any deadlines?

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What will happen to the experimental GraphView? Will it be kept for backwards compatibility?

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I’m glad I held off using GraphView to make a tool for a current project. This sounds like it’ll be much better in the long run.

5 Likes
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So does that mean that there’s no built in support to load the graph topology at runtime, and everything built with this system will need to roll its own system to do this, and that every system will need to have two assets per graph, the editable graph itself, and a runtime usable asset.

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It would be pretty wild if we couldn’t use the authored data at runtime. What would be the point of the framework then?

A graph editing tool is just a visual representation of underlying data. There’s no reason why that data would be locked to editor-only, and of course it’s still up to use as to how that data is interpreted.