draw.io

Commentaires: Once for a project we had to create an UML sequence diagram. We used draw.io for this . It worked great, it looked fantastic. Until we noticed that we forgot some calls so we had to add more boxes and more arrows. We thought that surely we could just drag what we have around a bit without breaking everything but no. Luckily it wasn't very big yet so we started from scratch and did not connect the arrows to the boxes until we were sure everything was stable. There might be a way to stop the arrows from freaking out but we could not find it.

Avantages: I love draw.io . Need a graphic for a presentation or some sort of LaTeX report? Use draw.io, it certainly beats fiddling around with LaTeX to get what you want.
It allows you to export in .svg format (vector graphics) which you can scale to any size without loss of quality. Ever tried to increase the size of a .jpg or the like and noticed how horrible it looks? That doesn't happen with vector graphics.
It supports so many useful "graph types" out of the box, it's great. If you want to draw a specific kind of diagram/graph it most likely supports that and gives you all the boxes, edges, etc. that you need to make your graph.
Aligning your elements is super easy thanks to a wonderful grid system that lets you (among other things) place components perfectly aligned side-by-side or under each other.
You can customize virtually anything, size, color, font, font size, anything. Complete control over what you are trying to make.
If you need to make a graph or diagram of some kind and there is no tool to make the specific thing you need, just use draw.io. Or, if there is, still use draw.io because it will probably look nicer and give you a lot more option than whatever tool you want to use.

Inconvénients: The one thing I dislike, I'd say even HATE about draw.io are the arrows. Simple use case: You want to connect two boxes with an arrow. That's simple - except later you notice you don't like the position of the boxes and move them. Now your arrows will most likely try to bend in ways to keep the connection but by doing so they will get horribly bent and look atrocious. This is especially bad if you move multiple boxres.

Commentaires: It has been extremely useful in my work to display the workflow of a mobile application to people who are not very acquainted with technology. It was indeed very easy and quick to create personalized diagrams of any size, especially because there are many templates to choose from. All those templates are crafted professionally and give you a great starting point for any kind of project. It is also superbly adapted to suit businesses, as it can import from many services including Dropbox, OneDrive, GitHub, Google Drive and Trello. This makes it simple to share a file with anyone in the office, especially considering the many export options available. Because it is a reliable and fast software, I ended up designing quick projects for my company and it has worked flawlessly since the first time I opened it to try it out.

Avantages: It is very easy to style any diagram to your needs, but the default templates look great out of the box too! I don't play much with styles, but I use the other integrated tools quite a lot, including those for aligning, resizing and distributing elements. There are in fact many different elements to choose from and it's easy to find what you are looking for because everything is nicely categorized. I particularly enjoy how easy it is to position and connect the pieces together in the grid: you can quickly duplicate boxes, draw arrows between them or insert text that are perfectly aligned with everything else. Because of the underlying technologies it uses behind the scenes, the software is available on the web (online or offline with an extension) and it also offers desktop applications, which work equally well. When working with larger diagrams, the outline view comes in very handy. The software allows to export to many useful formats such as PNG, JPEG, SVG, PDF, HTML and others and provides options to get the code to embed the diagram as an image (including SVG) or even inside Google Docs and Google Slides. It is so intuitive that I never had the need to follow along the nonetheless excellent tutorials available on their website.

Inconvénients: There isn't much to be said against such a well designed piece of software. I will point out, however, that even though I'm usually a huge fan of using the dark theme in as many applications as possible, I found it very distracting with draw.io. The contrasts weren't accentuated enough to my taste and I found it hard to see clearly the outline of the boxes in the diagram when working with a grid. The other themes (Kennedy, Minimal and Atlas) are fantastic, but I like using the default theme most.

Commentaires: With draw.io I can easily develop diagrams in a short time, my experience with this software has been quite good, it has been integrated with other technologies such as Google Drive, it is excellent for collaborative projects, it has a great performance and it helps me. Do not spend so much time developing the design of the diagrams, and thinking more about the information and the workflow that will follow.

Avantages: This is one of my favorites for many reasons, a very nice interface, intuitive and clean, it allows me to create all kinds of diagrams from 0, real time recording, with a great personalization, besides that it is only drag and drop so I can modify everything I want freely, besides all this also allows me to export and import files directly from popular cloud platforms such as dropbox, google drive, trello, etc. It supports a variety of formats, it also has a very wide variety of predefined shapes.

Inconvénients: It is a very useful tool, however, it is for a basic or intermediate use, when very elaborate diagrams are needed, it is a bit short in the amount of tools and customization, however it is still a great tool.

Commentaires: Draw.io is a massive and lasting improvement to our online knowledgebase and injects the power of making complex scenarios or setups more approachable by visual aids into modern wiki based knowledgebases. This is done by keeping the visual source available in that very same knowledgebase where the corresponding text is also kept. A massive improvement. Absolute recommendation...I would melt away in love, would just the UI look a little better.

Avantages: Integrates perfectly with the Atlassian Confluence Wiki. After inserting graphics and never being able to modify them again (let alone quickly or on the fly) into our knowledge base draw.io was was revelation.
It works perfectly to visualize complex charts, gants, images or any other structures and keep the information - in the spirit of a wiki - versioned and editable in order to reflect further changes. Also, I wa suprised in how efficient and stable drafts were saved when sudden disconnects occured or I had to interrupt my work.

Inconvénients: The UI is not slick. Sometimes it had me wondering wether I could do what i wanted with draw.io because it all looked a little like windows 3.1. Then again, everything worked flawlessly. Sometimes the way draw.io saves and manages drawings internally (what is saved where, who can see it, who can access it, etc.) was a little intransparent to me. I always was able to figure it out but would have liked it better when the Information would have been more clear and visible from the start on.

Commentaires: Draw.io is a comfortable tool to pick up and put down, and it gets the job done. Often, during my workflow, I open a new tab in Chrome, type 'dr' and the url pops up, and a moment or two later I'm constructing a quick diagram-- layout of casters on a lumber cart, for example, for a maintenance spreadsheet-- then exporting the image. Everything saves to the cloud, or I download it immediately and import/embed/paste it into the target document, and continue on.

Avantages: I find draw.io almost effortless to utilize. Frequently I need to produce a simple diagram, layout, or the like and don't need the titanic functionality of market-leading image-manipulation software or its cousins. I can start draw.io without fanfare and export an image in one of sufficiently-varied formats for many of my needs.

Inconvénients: There are some very basic things that the software doesn't to (or that I don't know how to do with the software) that either are not part of its capabilities or are not sufficiently straightforward. Ironically, simply drawing is one of the things I find the software incapable of. That said, this limitation and others don't put me off the tool, they just force sometimes annoying workarounds.