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I’d say for the majority use-case (as I see it), they’re excellent for manual diagram curation. Especially, D2 for software arch diagrams. Mermaid is great at many things.

It’s kind of hard to write up a fair comparison - it’s apples to oranges.

I can say that vizdom performs very fast hierarchical layouts (currently the only supported type). Example 14 in the live editor runs in about 1 second on my M1 Mac - but if you refresh the page it CloudFront will complain since the graph state is all in the URL and it’s too long.

One thing is they're open source.

> the Rust WebAssembly binary included in this library is closed-source.

D2 is open, they just have an optional proprietary layout algo. Of course one might contend that the rest is ‘just’ tooling but I find D2 provides a very quick and easy way to rough out diagrams without touching a mouse. The open source algorithms are good enough for me.

Or PlantUML - or is that not in the running anymore?