Post Published on July 3, 2012.
Last Updated on April 24, 2016 by davemackey.
Microsoft‘s Visio is the product to have when you want to create diagrams. Your average graphic editing application just won’t cut it. I love Paint.NET, but you don’t want to make diagrams in it. There is the excellent open source Dia option, which is a viable alternative to Visio – but what if I don’t do diagrams that regularly and don’t want yet another application weighing down my computer? Is there an option for me…Yes, says this salesman for Diagram.ly who is not employed nor a salesman nor paid to promote Diagram.ly.
Diagram.ly is just an example application. What?!? That’s right. The folks at JGraph wanted to show developers the power of their mxGraph developer library and so they built a nice little application called Diagram.ly that is freely available to all and one monster of a powerful competitor to both Visio and Dia for the casual diagramming audience.
Nahh, I’m not going to write a long review of it. Just go use it. It is intuitive, responsive, and free…You’ll have the swing of it in five minutes or less. I’ve been using it whenever I need to make diagrams and it is just swell (and yes, I have used Visio…and would still use it for some work projects, but in general…this is the way to go!).
I’ll note that my only small complaint is that there aren’t all the shape types I’d like to see. For example, I’d like to see a set for architecture.
I LOVE you Jgraph! I LOVE you Diagram.ly! I LOVE you mxGraph!
If you love it you’ll probably love our tool Creately too.
Creately is a good tool as well, I chose Diagram.ly because I’m not frequently needing to draw these sorts of diagrams / images but also don’t necessarily want them to be public. Creately is free, but only for 5 public diagrams. Still, for those who are working with diagrams, etc. more frequently, the pricing isn’t bad (e.g. $5/mo. for the personal account). Thanks for dropping by Nishadha!