Visio vs Lucidchart

We can't tell you which is better FOR YOU. You have to decide it. What sort of charts/diagrams do you want to make? Do you have to share the charts with someone else? What program do they have, Visio?

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The first criteria for many people is how much do you want to spend. Visio is not cheap ... Visio 2019 Standard is US$280. Lucid is free ... which typically means it supports fewer features.

Here are links to some reviews and other alternatives to Visio.

2020 01 22- 7 Best Free Flowchart Software for Windows

https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/best-free-flowchart-tools-windows/

Flowcharts aren’t just for engineers, programmers, and managers. Everyone can benefit from learning how to make flowcharts, most notably as a way to streamline your work and life, and even to break free from bad habits.

Dia (Free)

yEd Graph Editor (Free)

ThinkComposer (Free)

Pencil Project (Free)

LibreOffice (Free)

Diagram Designer (Free)

PlantUML (Free)

LucidChart  (web)

Whimsical – Free / $10 per user per month

https://whimsical.co/

Flowcharts / Wireframes / Stickey Notes

Mermaids

https://mermaidjs.github.io/

Ever wanted to simplify documentation and avoid heavy tools like Visio when explaining your code?

This is why mermaid was born, a simple markdown-like script language for generating charts from text via javascript. Try it using our editor.

diagramiq (free)

https://diagramiq.com/

https://diagramiq.com/faq.html 

Our full feature set and pricing will be introduced in 2019.

Give direction to your ideas from conception to execution.

Create flowcharts, BPMN, UML models and other unique diagrams in a breeze!

Diagram and collaborate with your entire team. All it takes is your email address to get started.

Venn Diagrams - Picture relationships between two or more sets of items by drawing a custom Venn diagram. It takes less than a minute with Diagramiq's predefined shapes.

Data Flow Charts - Map the "flow" of data through an information system, by creating a data flow diagram. To get you started we've got some examples ready for you.

BPMN Diagrams -Like a flowchart but much more than that. Easily represent information moving between teams, data being stored on the cloud and departments working in parallel on the same process.

System Architecture -System architecture diagrams are used to show the relationship between different components in systems which include hardware and software. These are represented in the diagram to show the interaction between them.

Simple Diagrams (7 day free trial, buy US$50)

https://www.simplediagrams.com/

A desktop app for creating fast, clear sketches of problems, processes, workflows, ideas and more!

·  Comes with over 500 pre-drawn shapes. Drag shape from library and Drop to diagram

·  Create custom libraries for your own shapes.

·  Export your work to PDF, PNG or SVG.

SimpleDiagrams is easy to use, and good for lots of stuff:

UI Diagrams

Process Flows

Mind maps

Infographics

Maps & Plans

Simple UML

...and more. With plugin shape and background libraries, the possibilities are endless.

Ipe extensible drawing editor

http://ipe.otfried.org/

http://ipe.otfried.org/manual/manual.html

https://github.com/otfried/ipe-wiki/wiki/Showcase - examples

Ipe is a drawing editor for creating figures in PDF or (encapsulated) Postscript format. It supports making small figures for inclusion into LaTeX-documents as well as making multi-page PDF presentations that can be shown on-line with Acrobat Reader.

Ipe's main features are:

·      Entry of text as LaTeX source code. This makes it easy to enter mathematical expressions, and to reuse the LaTeX-macros of the main document. In the display text is displayed as it will appear in the figure.

·      Produces pure Postscript/PDF, including the text. Ipe converts the LaTeX-source to PDF or Postscript when the file is saved.

·      It is easy to align objects with respect to each other (for instance, to place a point on the intersection of two lines, or to draw a circle through three given points) using various snapping modes.

·      Users can provide ipelets (Ipe plug-ins) to add functionality to Ipe. This way, Ipe can be extended for each task at hand.

·      The text model is based on Unicode, and has been tested with Korean, Chinese, and Japanese.

·      Ipe can be compiled for Unix and Windows.

·      Ipe is written in standard C++ and Lua 5.3..

Preparing figures for a scientific article is a time-consuming process. If you are using the LaTeX document preparation system in an environment where you can include (encapsulated) Postscript figures or PDF figures, then the extensible drawing editor Ipe may be able to help you in the task. Ipe allows you to prepare and edit drawings containing a variety of basic geometry primitives like lines, splines, polygons, circles etc.

Ipe also allows you to add text to your drawings, and unlike most other drawing programs, Ipe treats these text object as LaTeX text. This has the advantage that all usual LaTeX commands can be used within the drawing, which makes the inclusion of mathematical formulae (or even simple labels like "qi") much simpler. Ipe processes your LaTeX source and includes its Postscript or PDF rendering in the figure.

In addition, Ipe offers you some editing functions that can usually only be found in professional drawing programs or cad systems. For instance, it incorporates a context sensitive snapping mechanism, which allows you to draw objects meeting in a point, having parallel edges, objects aligned on intersection points of other objects, rectilinear and c-oriented objects and the like. Whenever one of the snapping modes is enabled, Ipe shows you Fifi, a secondary cursor, which keeps track of the current aligning.

One of the nicest features of Ipe is the fact that it is extensible. You can write your own functions, so-called ipelets. Once registered with Ipe by adding them to your ipelet path, you can use those functions like Ipe's own editing functions. (In fact, some of the functions in the standard Ipe distribution are actually implemented as ipelets.) Ipelets can be written in Lua, an easy-to-learn interpreted language that is embedded into Ipe, or also in C++. Among others, there is an ipelet to compute Voronoi diagrams.

Making a presentation is another task that requires drawing figures. You can use Ipe to prepare presentations in PDF format. Ipe offers many features to make attractive presentations.

Ipe tries to be self-explanatory. There is online help available, and most commands tell you about options, shortcuts, or errors. Nevertheless, it would probably be wise to read at least a few sections of this manual. The chapter on general concepts and the chapter explaining the snapping functions would be a useful read. If you want to use Ipe to prepare presentations, you should also read the chapter on presentations.

Graphviz

http://graphviz.org/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphviz 

Graphviz is open source graph visualization software. Graph visualization is a way of representing structural information as diagrams of abstract graphs and networks. It has important applications in networking, bioinformatics,  software engineering, database and web design, machine learning, and in visual interfaces for other technical domains. 

The Graphviz layout programs take descriptions of graphs in a simple text language, and make diagrams in useful formats, such as images and SVG for web pages; PDF or Postscript for inclusion in other documents; or display in an interactive graph browser.  Graphviz has many useful features for concrete diagrams, such as options for colors, fonts, tabular node layouts, line styles, hyperlinks, and custom shapes. 

Graphviz consists of a graph description language named the DOT language^[4]^ and a set of tools that can generate and/or process DOT files:

Dot- a command-line tool to produce layered drawings of directed graphs in a variety of output formats (PostScript, PDF, SVG, annotated text and so on).

Neato- for "spring model" layout (in Mac OS version called "energy minimised")

sfdp - a layout engine for undirected graphs that scales to very large graphs.

fdp - another layout engine for undirected graphs.

twopi - for radial graph layouts.

circo - for circular graph layouts.

dotty - a graphical user interface to visualize and edit graphs.

lefty - a programmable (in a language inspired by EZ^[5]^) widget that displays DOT graphs and allows the user to perform actions on them with the mouse. Lefty can therefore be used as the view in a model-view-controller GUI application that uses graphs.

Limnu – Online Whiteboard

https://limnu.com/

<snip> I helped build a whiteboarding tool that is great for simple hand-drawn diagrams, and truly looks whiteboardy. … We used Limnu to create all the diagrams for the online book “Ray Tracing in One Weekend.” http://www.realtimerendering.com/raytracing/Ray%20Tracing%20... </snip>

PlantUML in a nutshell

http://plantuml.com/

Demo of PlantUML text and diagrams: https://github.com/joelparkerhenderson/demo_plantuml

(rohn007) this tool can be run from dozens of programs (http://plantuml.com/running ), but it looks to have a bit of a learning curve.

PlantUML is used to draw UML diagrams, using a simple and human readable text description.

Be careful, because it does not prevent you from drawing inconsistent diagrams (such as having two classes inheriting from each other, for example). So it's more a drawing tool than a modeling tool.

Links to png or svg generated by PlantUML Server are valid forever (that is as long as the server is up).

However, we do not store any diagrams on our servers.

This may sound contradictory. It is not: the whole diagram is compressed into the URL itself. When the server receives the URL, it decompresses the URL to retrieve the diagram text and generates the image. There is no need to store anything. Even if the server is down, you can retrieve the diagram using the flag -decodeurl with the command line. Furthermore, the diagram data is stored in PNG metadata, so you can fetch it even from a downloaded image.

PlantUML limits image width and height to 4096. There is a environment variable that you can set to override this limit: PLANTUML_LIMIT_SIZE. You have to define this variable before launching PlantUML, something like:

set PLANTUML_LIMIT_SIZE=8192

or

setenv PLANTUML_LIMIT_SIZE 8192

Another way is an option in the command line:

java -DPLANTUML_LIMIT_SIZE=8192 -jar /path/to/plantuml.jar ...

Note that if you generate very big diagrams, (for example, something like 20 000 x 10 000 pixels), you can have some memory issues. The solution is to add this parameter to the java vm : -Xmx1024m.

<snip>

The best thing about plant is that you don't draw things out. you describe them. I actually feel like this is the way we SHOULD do diagrams so that we have flexibility to re-do them. I wish that Markdown would include plantUML natively.

</snip>

---

PlantUML is a component that allows to quickly write :

·      Sequence diagram

·      Usecase diagram

·      Class diagram

·      Activity diagram (here is the legacy syntax)

·      Component diagram

·      State diagram

·      Object diagram

·      Deployment diagram 

·      Timing diagram 

The following non-UML diagrams are also supported:

·      Wireframe graphical interface

·      Archimate diagram

·      Specification and Description Language (SDL)

·      Ditaa diagram

·      Gantt diagram 

·      Mathematic with AsciiMath or JLaTeXMath notation

Diagrams are defined using a simple and intuitive language. (see PlantUML Language Reference Guide).

New users can read the quick start page. There is also a F.A.Q. page. PlantUML can be used within many other tools.

Images can be generated in PNG, in SVG or in LaTeX format. It is also possible to generate ASCII art diagrams (only for sequence diagrams).

Word Add-in – Template

Adriaan van den Brand has made many improvements to the Word Add-in.

He has created a Word Template that allows a very good integration between Word and PlantUML and better performance.

With this Word Add-in, a new bar will be available within Word:

By click on "Preferences", you can now choose to use EPS instead of PNG for diagrams to improve print quality (because EPS is a vector image format.)

This template allows using PlantUML directly from MS Word 2010 without need to alter document templates or edit VBA macro's. MS Word Versions 2007 and 2013 might work, but are not tested.

Everything is documented in the template itself, that you can download here.

The macro searches the plantuml.jar file in that order:

·      In the same directory as your document

·      Then, in the parent directory of this directory

·      Then, in the parent directory of the parent... up to the root folder

·      Then, in the same directory as the normal.dot file

·      Then, in the parent directory of this directory

·      Then, in the parent directory of the parent... up to the root folder

If the plantuml.jar file is not found, a box display the list of all searched directories.

yEd

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YEd

yEd is a general-purpose diagramming program with a multi-document interface.

It is a cross-platform application written in Java that runs on Windows, Linux, Mac OS, and other platforms that support the Java Virtual Machine.

It is released under a proprietary software license, that allows using a single copy gratis.[1]

yEd can be used to draw many different types of diagrams,^[2]^ including flowcharts, network diagrams, UMLs, BPMN, mind maps, organization charts, and entity-relationship diagrams. yEd also allows the use of custom vector and raster graphics as diagram elements.

yEd loads and saves diagrams from/to GraphML, an XML-based format. It can also print very large diagrams that span multiple pages.

yEd Graph Editor

https://www.yworks.com/products/yed

https://www.yworks.com/products/yed/gallery 

yEd is a powerful desktop application that can be used to quickly and effectively generate high-quality diagrams.

Create diagrams manually, or import your external data for analysis. Our automatic layout algorithms arrange even large data sets with just the press of a button.

yEd is freely available and runs on all major platforms: Windows, Unix/Linux, and macOS.

The latest release is version 3.18.2

Import your own data from an Excel® spreadsheet (.xls) or XML.

Create diagrams with ease via an intuitive user interface.

Automatically arrange your diagram elements.

Export bitmap and vector graphics as PNG, JPG, SVG, PDF, SWF.

yEd supports a wide variety of diagram types. In addition to the illustrated types, yEd also supports organization charts, mind maps, swimlane diagrams, Entity Relationship diagrams, and many more.

BPMN Diagrams

Flowcharts

Family Trees

Semantic Networks

Social Networks

UML Class Diagrams

LaTeX/TikZ

https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/LaTeX/PGF/TikZ

https://www.latex-tutorial.com/tutorials/tikz/ 

One way to draw graphics directly with TeX commands is PGF/TikZ. TikZ can produce portable graphics in both PDF and PostScript formats using either plain (pdf)TEX, (pdf)Latex or ConTEXt. It comes with very good documentation and an extensive collection of examples: http://www.texample.net/tikz/ .

PGF ("portable graphics format") is the basic layer, providing a set of basic commands for producing graphics, and TikZ ("TikZ ist kein Zeichenprogramm") is the frontend layer with a special syntax, making the use of PGF easier. TikZ commands are prevalently similar to Metafont, the option mechanism is similar to PsTricks syntax.

While the previous systems (, , or ) focus on the how to draw, TikZ focuses more on the what to draw. One could say that TikZ is to as LaTeX is to TeX. It's recommended to use it if your LaTeX distribution includes it.

Overleaf – Online LaTeX/Tix Editor

https://www.overleaf.com/learn/latex/TikZ_package

GNU PIC

http://floppsie.comp.glam.ac.uk/Glamorgan/gaius/web/pic.html

2018 09 16- 8 Online Tools to Draw Diagrams and Flowcharts

https://www.groovypost.com/reviews/8-online-tools-draw-diagrams-flowcharts/

By Lori Kaufman

Diagramming and flowcharting tools are handy for many purposes. You can use them to brainstorm ideas, create mind maps, sketch software designs, sketch out product roadmaps and milestones, or even create team presentations.

If you’d rather not download and install a tool for creating diagrams and flowcharts, there are many online options. Microsoft Visio is one of those options, but if you’re looking for a tool that’s not from Microsoft, here’s a list of other options.

1.Lucidchart

2.Draw.io

3.Cacoo

4.Gliffy

5.Sketchboard

6.Creately

7.DrawAnywhere

**8.**Google Drawings.

2016 07 20- LucidChart in Microsoft Office

https://office-watch.com/2016/lucidchart-in-microsoft-office/

Browser based (IE Specific!) addin that exports static image charts

LucidChart is a very nice diagramming and flowchart tool which is now better integrated with Microsoft Office.

Office has diagram tools via Insert | Shapes but they aren’t very elegant.  Shapes can be linked if you select the 3 “Connector” type lines/arrows.

Lucidchart is a lot smarter.  Here’s a simple example where moving the ‘Heading 1’ shape automatically adjusts the arrows and there’s guides to indicate the gaps above and below..

According to LucidChart’s press release “Previously, Lucidchart users exported files as static images and copied them into Microsoft Office documents. With the new add-ins, users can now create and insert Lucidchart diagrams directly into their Word, Excel and PowerPoint projects”.   That’s stretching it … the new system isn’t as good as those words might appear.

You still can only add an image into Office documents, but the process is somewhat easier.  It’s not true Office integration where the diagram is editable inside the Office program, but it’s better than what we had.

LucidChart for Office is an Office addin for Word 2013 Service Pack 1 or later, Word 2016 for Mac, Word 2016 for Windows and Word Online. Go to Insert | Addins | Store and search for LucidChart.

We had trouble with the log in process which is surprisingly clumsy.  Scroll down for options to log in with a Google or Yahoo account (but not a Microsoft account).

In our tests, the Lucidchart addin would only open Internet Explorer when a browser window is needed.  The users default browser or Edge (on a Windows 10 machine) aren’t available.  That’s important because the work you do in LucidChart will be in that browser.

The LucidChart addin for Office is a portal to view the documents (diagrams) saved in your account with Lucidchart.

From the addin pane you can create a new diagram or edit and existing one.  Clicking those buttons opens up a browser window and starts LucidChart.

Lucidchart is a browser based program and a good example of how advanced programs can be in the once humble browser.

Once you’ve finished making your diagram, save it and switch back to Office.   Select the Lucidchart document when click Insert.  The add-in will convert your diagram into an image then insert the image into your Office document.

The inserted image and Lucidchart diagram are NOT linked. Any changes to the LucidChart are not automatically reflected in your Office document.  You’ll need to re-insert the diagram and replace the image.

The Office add-in is free and Lucidchart has free accounts plus a seven day trial of their paid offerings.

For more details go toLucidchart.

Lucid

https://www.lucidchart.com/pages/examples/flowchart_software/b/reg

IT / Engineering

·      Free ERD diagram tool

·      UML diagram tool

·      Network diagram software

·      P&ID software

·      AWS network diagram software

·      Database design tool

·      Visio online

·             Workflow diagram software

Business

·      Free flowchart software & examples

·      Free org chart software

·      Data flow diagram software

·      Value stream mapping software

·      Business process mapping tool

·      Process documentation software

·      Process mapping software

·             BPMN software

Product Management & Design

·      Wireframe software

·      iPhone mockups

·      Android mockups

·      iPad mockups

·      Floor plan software

·      Venn diagram maker

·      Mind mapping software

·      Concept map maker

Do you need a yEd alternative that supports collaboration, requires no installation process, and allows for Visio import and export? Lucidchart is the answer.

Basic: $60/yr, $5/mo

Pro: $108/yr, $10/mo

Visio compatible

Import Visio files (.vdx, .vsd, or .vsdx) with the click of a button. Once they’re uploaded, you can view them and make your own edits with our easy-to-use tools. If your colleagues still use Visio, you can even export your original Lucidchart diagrams as Visio files!

2015 10 13- Create an org chart or a diagram in minutes with Lucidchart (online)

http://www.techrepublic.com/article/create-an-org-chart-or-a-diagram-in-minutes-with-lucidchart/

https://www.lucidchart.com/****

Diagramming tools frequently offer a vast range of features and capabilities. Occasionally an app’s scalability makes it unwieldy. Lucidchart suffers no such shortfall.

They offer timed free trial, extended free plan limited to 60 objects on diagram.

Do you offer special nonprofit and educational pricing?

Yes. We offer 50% discounts on annual team accounts for nonprofits, and free accounts for students and teachers. Email ******@lucidchart.com for non-profit inquiries. Visit our education page for educational inquiries.

Using the web-based platform, Mac users can create, view, and edit landscapes, maps, floor plans, flowcharts, network diagrams, and numerous other diagrams, and then update and view the same files using an iPhone, iPad, or Windows desktop. iOS users can also create new files, if they wish.

**Before you pick an app, create a process map**

https://www.techrepublic.com/article/before-you-pick-an-app-create-a-process-map/

To improve the odds that an app will work (and people will like it), help people create a process map. Andy Wolber shows you how.

"What app should we use?" reads the email.

The question appears reasonable. A long paragraph describes some of the people, systems, and processes involved.

Temptingly, the question also seems solvable. The information given allows me to eliminate some solutions. I know of some apps that might work.

Yet, I know my response: "I won't tell you what app to use, but I can help you choose."

What is your criteria? What kind of diagrams you create?

You can find a lot of free visio alternatives! Some of them have even more opportunities then visio for web (aka visio plan 1)