ParaView is an open source multiple-platform application for interactive, scientific visualization. It has a client–server architecture to facilitate remote visualization of datasets, and generates level of detail (LOD) models to maintain interactive frame rates for large datasets. It is an application built on top of the Visualization Tool Kit (VTK) libraries. Where VTK is a set of libraries that provide visualization services for data, task, and pipeline parallelism, ParaView is an application designed for data parallelism on shared-memory or distributed-memory multicomputers and clusters. It can also be run as a single-computer application.

ParaView offers the possibility to extend its functionality in several directions. This encompasses modifications to the GUI and implementation of new plugins.