Draw.io: Online Diagramming Website
github.com
github.com
I'm not associated with the product at all, but it definitely needs more love in the space.
Love the interface, hate the free plan.
So, draw.io it is.
PS: The UX is great and the diagrams are beautiful but I don't use it enough to pay THAT much. It's totally OK though, I'm probably not in the target market.
$200 per two year period for mostly client-side diagram software doesn’t sound like a deal to me.
Cheers
How will I know what I can do with this?
Pretty rare for software imo.
For me, the biggest advantage Draw.io has over many of its competitors is that it can be self-hosted.
It’s worth it.
The syntax is stupid easy and you really would have to try to mess it up. Fast to make workflow diagrams that other people can edit.
Even as a common dirty pirate; I donated to all of those.
(disclaimer: employee of Lucid Software)
draw.io is like the In-N-Out of charting software. The menu is short, but you know exactly what you're getting each time and the price is right. It may not be the best at everything, but I'm almost never disappointed.
Lucidchart feels like that neighborhood restaurant that has a six page menu that tries to be everything to everyone. It feels like they should have anything I desire, but they're spread so thin across so many options that they can never really perfect any of the individual entrees. I can usually find something in Lucidchart that looks like it would solve my problem, but it always feels half-finished. I waste hours each month learning to work around the quirks and limitations of the different components. I always leave slightly dissatisfied that Lucidchart almost did what I needed, but due to the limitations of the component I would have been better off just drawing a simple chart in draw.io or even in Sketch.
For example: The Lucidchart iPad app sounds like a dream come true. I would love to make charts on the go with a great iPad interface that properly utilizes the Apple Pencil. However, every time I use Lucidchart on iPad I spend all my time accidentally moving the page when I wanted to drag the corner of box, failing to select text for editing, switching between fingers and Pencil, and so on. I end up walking back to a computer to finish the chart. I want to believe the Lucidchart iPad app would be great, but I always spend so much time fighting it that I'd be better off sitting down with draw.io and making a basic chart in 10 minutes.
Last time I used it, before switching to draw.io, it became slow to the point of being unusable once you had a few pages in a document. And I was making an animation where each page showed the next step in a process, so there were a lot of pages.
This was a couple of years ago, so things may have changed since.
My diagrams may have a bunch of elements on them, but I don't think I use any advanced features (irrespective of whether it's Visio, LucidChart or draw.io). From that perspective, these isn't much difference between any of these programs, so there's just no reason to use a paid product.
Yes, Lucidchart's performance has improved in the past couple years. And we now have resources dedicated to improving performance.
> From that perspective, these isn't much difference between any of these programs, so there's just no reason to use a paid product.
That's fair. I think Lucidchart's main advantage is more advanced functionality. And if you don't need that functionality, why pay for it?
Things I liked were that I could have a quick collaborative diagram with a friend for some bs project and not pay for it, and I could have a reasonable SAAS offering for a commercial team that wasn't expensive enough I got pushback. It was always a bit slow, and sometime quirky about connection placements but the diagrams were acceptable quality. Early on it was a lot less polished but you could make it work. And it was never a tool I'd use every day or realistically even every month, so it needed to be fairly low cost but I was happy to pay for when I did need it.
Now it is effectively impractical without a subscription so I can't use it for the former case. And the team offering are more enterprise-y and about double the price without adding any functionality I care about, so I tend not to do that either.
At some point I moved companies and didn't suggest a new team subscription, where previously I was usually the advocate for it. And the upsell messages and limitations of the free tier led me to find draw.io, which meets my needs for one-offs and little side projects as well as Lucid Chart ever did.
I'd say functionally they are mostly on par currently for my usages ... but that's the crux of your problem as a 10/month/head subscription.
Oh, and fwiw I use the offline version of draw.io most of the time, it's very responsive and also I like to work sometimes offline.
(former employee)
PlantUML (http://plantuml.com/) with demo at (http://planttext.com). Creating most diagrams through a simple markup language that can be version controlled and rendered on demand has been really nice for me, and sometimes I would spent SO MUCH TIME in draw.io making sure my arrows were even, making the pixels line up, making sure I used the right shape with the right font size, etc, that it was liberating to just succinctly describe my data and have it automatically render.
For more complex diagrams or to plan a diagram, I've also gone back to paper. There really is nothing better than a notebook in front of you and a collection of colored pens and stencils.
I think most of us feel this!
I agree PlantUML makes that a lot easier. The thing is, the second you need to make something other than a UML, you’re going to another tool.
That said, while draw.io does an excellent job of their connector and arrow system usually getting it close, a UML or some sort of “strict grid mode” would be nice.
I love this about Draw.io. This is how I want to build my applications. I don't want to deal with storing any user data and rather let them handle it how they see fit.
Anybody know of a library of service (preferably open source) that offers an easy API to interact with all these in such a way?
Here's our open source file picker: https://github.com/kloudless/file-explorer/ (the server-side is closed source and requires a paid subscription beyond a point)
Only other option I could find is https://github.com/rclone/rclone but it's a commandline tool
https://remotestoragejs.readthedocs.io/en/latest/getting-sta...
I've followed draw.io back since I met them at Google I/O in like 2010 or 2011, I think they were one of Drive's first third party apps.
From a user perspective that sounds like a super useful feature, though perhaps unexpected unless you were directly informed of it.
I would like to use a tool where I first describe the relations in text/code and the layouting and formatting is done separately, and formatting should be hierarchical.
I don’t consider that a reasonable criticism. Of course using pen and paper is quicker and easier. The advantage of any digital format is that it is distributable, universally readable and persistent.
I have a "smart pen" that saves anything I write as a PDF on my phone that can be searched and stored where I choose (including cloud services).
The downside is that you have to write on special paper or in special notebooks. But it's not as terrible as it sounds because the notebooks are very reasonably priced.
It also works as an actual pen.
PDF's are a terminal format though, and doesn't really meet the need of a persistent, editable, graphic format for diagrams.
Did you actually try this tool? it makes mass aligning/resizing extremely easy. For instance, to change dimensions of multiple elements you just select them and then type desired width/height. It is also has pretty standard arrange and distribute controls.
This was the only tool I could find that would work with version control.
You can download and use yed for free - I think their business model is that you pay for integration with other tools. It's not open source though.
In particular, yEd is what I would call critical for quickly generating easily readable dependency diagrams with more than, say, 50 elements. The heirarchical layout supports octilinear edge routing (like subway diagrams), which makes resulting layouts readable even with hundreds or thousands of elements. Also, I have printed out large yEd dependency diagrams on a plotter -- so if you can "print to PDF" (like on a Mac or a recent Windows version), generating a PDF should be simple.
I just counted the number of options available on the "hierarchical" layout. This isn't a competition, but it does give you an idea of how thoroughly their developers built it: there are 51 configurable options. And in addition to "heirarchical", there are 19 other automatic layout types available, each with their own options.
Additionally, yEd's native file format is graphml, which is an open standard and can be generated programmatically.
I use it all off-line, in vscode with various plugins, though mermaid was made for web.
The site is only for sequence diagrams “swim lanes” but at that task I’ve found nothing better. I love describing the relationships textually and then selecting the best style for the job.
Many tools fail at basic style annotation so I can abstract the style. Even that would be an improvement for drawing diagrams.
draw.io is a much nicer than let's say, Visual Paradigm
I have only used Visual Paradigm in university though.
I quite like the draw.io nextcloud app as well, though I guess it could also be a storage provider on the website for better integration :)
It's easy to get something that looks relatively pretty made relatively quickly, and unlike something like Omnigraffle, it works on Linux.
Great website. (and I will be downloading the desktop client :)
brew cask install drawio
I would pay for something that is browser only and generates really nice text art for diagrams.
Brandur's blog was an inspiration for me as well !
If you want ascii-style diagrams there are a few free web apps which work 100% better than monodraw.
The current solutions we have at my work are extremely difficult to use with VCS.
I've looked at Mermaid [0], but it is pretty limiting in its feature set.
I typically use draw.io/mxGraph [1] when I'm making diagrams and flowcharts, but the XML-based file format is pretty overwhelming for humans to read.
I especially like that there's an ascii renderer for the sequence diagrams that makes embedding them in Readme's very easy
[0] http://plantuml.com/ [1] http://plantuml.com/activity-diagram-beta [2] https://github.com/RicardoNiepel/C4-PlantUML [3] https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=jebbs.pl... [4] https://hub.docker.com/r/plantuml/plantuml-server/
I was at Amazon working on something - their own engineer was using draw.io to quickly grab AWS icons for Lambda, IoT core, API Gateway etc and place them into his flow chart.
He said they had a library somewhere of AWS artwork, but it was easier to just use draw.io’s art lib.
Drawio is also trying to implement this through PlantUML but it's not fully functional yet with only some constrained types on PlantUML support.
Only issue with it is that the source code (of the front-end) is quite hairy to understand and modify. I tried to add support for Github Enterprise (https://github.com/jgraph/drawio/issues/473) and was quite lost.
Main problem from our end on your issue is we don't have access to a Github enterprise instance to test anything.
I'm wondering about the licenses of icons, clipart or other shapes that are available for the diagrams. There are a lot of shapes, are they all usable without counterpart in any document (private or public)? If not, is there a way to check the licenses of the shapes we want to use?
The latter has a pretty cool feature that re-arranges all objects according to some predefined layout. Quite neat.
Good stuff either way. I always thought it was amazing that it was free.
https://www.screencast.com/t/g4wnSWLDtOLk
Clicking the "Sign in" button closes the dialog and reopens it. It does this cycle twice, then shows this error pane:
But... the offline tool is superior for speed and UX imo. That’s where it really shines.
Fascinating to hear the other uses, and thankyou for a wonderful and elegant tool!
"Error Maximum call stack size exceeded"
Addtionally, you can deploy a local version via docker, or use the stand-alone desktop version, https://github.com/jgraph/drawio has the links.
If you save it in your Google Drive, you can control who has access. Even better if it's your organization's GSuite
i have confirmed this with a local instance of draw.io
I made a diagram on Sunday and saved it to my local device without logging in; nothing stored in the cloud. Just opened it again from my local storage and it loaded into draw.io with no problem.
Our G Suite administrators have plenty of control over the G Suite Google Drives that would be used with draw.io and our Google accounts.
The only bits of our data we don't trust with Google are PHI