How Neodisk's Treemap and Sunburst Views Differ

Neodisk's treemap and sunburst views show the same disk-usage data in two different layouts. The treemap uses nested rectangles, where each rectangle's area is proportional to the space a file or folder takes up — best for quickly spotting what is eating the most space. The sunburst uses concentric rings, where each ring is a folder level and each wedge is a child item — best for following a deep folder path and understanding how a directory is structured. You can switch between them, so the practical answer is: use the treemap to find the big offenders, then switch to the sunburst to trace exactly where they live.

What each view is good at

Treemap: find the biggest space consumers fast

In a treemap, the whole disk (or the folder you're scanning) is a rectangle, and every file and folder inside it is drawn as a smaller rectangle sized to its share of the space. Big rectangles are big files or folders.

This makes the treemap the better view when your question is "what is taking up all my space?" You don't need to read labels carefully — your eye goes straight to the largest blocks. It's also compact: a lot of items fit on screen at once, so you can compare many folders side by side.

Trade-off: because rectangles are packed to fill space, the visual nesting can get hard to follow several levels deep. A small rectangle inside a big one doesn't obviously tell you the full path it sits on.

Sunburst: trace the folder hierarchy

In a sunburst, the center is the root, and each ring outward is one level deeper in the folder tree. Each wedge within a ring is a child of the folder it sits under, and the wedge's angle reflects its size.

This makes the sunburst the better view when your question is "where exactly is this, and how is this folder organized?" Because every ring is a level, you can follow a path from the center outward and see the chain of parent folders that leads to a large item. Deep nesting is much easier to read here than in a treemap.

Trade-off: as you go outward, wedges get thinner and harder to compare, and a sunburst shows fewer items legibly at once than a treemap.

Side-by-side comparison

How to use them together

A practical workflow, given that Neodisk lets you switch views:

1. Start in the treemap to scan for the largest blocks — that's your shortlist of space hogs.
2. Switch to the sunburst and follow the rings outward to confirm the exact folder path of an item you flagged.
3. Move back to the treemap to compare that folder against others at the same level.

Both views are read-only by design — Neodisk scans and visualizes, and per the site it never deletes your files — so you can explore freely without risk to your data.

Choosing based on your task

• If you just want to know what's using the most space, the treemap is the faster starting point.
• If you need to know how a folder is structured or where a large item sits in the tree, the sunburst answers that more directly.
• If you're unsure, the treemap is the more common entry point, and the sunburst is the natural follow-up for drilling into a specific path.

Neodisk is described as private, free, and open source, with downloads for Mac (Apple silicon and Intel) and Linux, plus a web demo and a Homebrew install (brew install --cask neodisk). Those details come from the site itself; the view behavior above reflects how treemaps and sunbursts encode data generally.