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Comment by blakeburch | Hacker News Reader

If you're looking for a fantastic diagramming site, I would recommend checking out [Whimsical](https://whimsical.com/). I've tried out a lot of solutions over the years (draw.io, LucidChart,Gliffy, etc.). Whimsical is the first that really nails the UI/UX. You spend less time fighting the system to make something that looks great and more time just building out your diagram.

I'm not associated with the product at all, but it definitely needs more love in the space.

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Love the interface and the fact that it's written in Clojure but it's worth mentioning Whimsical is $10/month vs. draw.io being free forever, and the Whimsical limited intro version is crippled in some quite annoying ways.

Just checked it out - it's incredibly stringent. It doesn't adjust your "free board" limit even if you delete a board. Create a board, delete it just to try out the interface? One of your free boards is gone forever.

Love the interface, hate the free plan.

You can restore your deleted board, manually remove all content and reuse it — but that’s them making it intentionally more painful than necessary.

So, draw.io it is.

Pretty sure they know what they are doing with pricing (and "charge more" mantra and all that) but I wonder if there will be more people paying if the prices were lower. With cheap storage and serverless compute one would think pricing could be better.

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.

I’d probably make 10-20 diagrams in the next two years. That’s $20 to $10 per diagram and then more if I want to keep them on their platform.

$200 per two year period for mostly client-side diagram software doesn’t sound like a deal to me.

To any business, $10 / month is literally nothing. If you pay $10 / month as a person, then I can see why it matters, but to a business that amount is nothing.

its an infinit canvas...so infinit space..so no need to pay if no collaboration needed :)

Draw.io has the advantage of being open source and able to be self-hosted. I wouldn't trade that flexibility and security for anything.

(co-founder of Whimsical here) Thanks for the mention! Couple fun facts - Whimsical is written 100% in Clojure and we are self-funded (https://whimsical.com/business/why-bootstrap/).

I'm on Linux and just signed up. How do you pan around? The arrow keys work, but opposite the direction I'd expect. Don't see any panning tool obvious. Is the use case touchpads like on a Mac?

Cheers

You can pan by holding down Space key (and then use mouse to drag the board). In general Whimsical's UX patterns are quite similar to Figma, Sketch and other UI design tools.

Freaking love whimsical. Keep it up!

Whilst it looks good, I love that I don't even need an account to use draw.io. We use it at work and integrates with Confluence perfectly.

If we're delving into paid services, I find Miro to be another incredible product in this space that absolutely nails the UX. My whole design team collaborates on Miro now and we love it.

https://miro.com/

Another lesser-known diagramming tool that shares elements of Whimsical and Miro is Plectica: https://www.plectica.com/

The website doesn’t actually show me anything but a nice picture though?

How will I know what I can do with this?

I wonder if they knew that name was already in use by an abandoned video player.

abandoned torrent client

We started drafting our architecture for https://VisualSitemaps.com with Draw.io but then when we discovered Whimsical and it’s intuitive design speed modern UX..it was hard to go back.

"Whimsical" You can't even try without providing your email. Any app/website asking me to do the hard work of providing my email when i have to do the favor of trying it out, my response has been no thanks, i am not gonna try.

Thanks for sharing whimsical. I just played around with this for a few minutes and I found it enjoyable.

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