Although it was initially developed for genomics research, it is largely domain agnostic and is now used as a general bioinformatics workflow management system.

It supports data uploads from the user's computer, by URL, and directly from many online resources (such as the UCSC Genome Browser, BioMart and InterMine).

The set of available tools has been greatly expanded over the years and Galaxy is now also used for gene expression, genome assembly, proteomics, epigenomics, transcriptomics and host of other disciplines in the life sciences.

[7] For example, Galaxy servers exist for image analysis,[8] computational chemistry[9] and drug design,[10] cosmology, climate modeling, social science,[11] and linguistics.

Galaxy is "an open, web-based platform for performing accessible, reproducible, and transparent genomic science.

This includes keeping track of all input, intermediate, and final datasets, as well as the parameters provided to, and the order of each step of the analysis.

[25] An example of extending Galaxy is Galaxy-P from the University of Minnesota Supercomputing Institute, which is customized as a data analysis platform for mass spectrometry-based proteomics.