draw.io is an online diagramming tool with integrations with Jira, Google, and Confluence available free online or at cost depending on integration chosen.
$5
per month
Wondershare EdrawMax
Score 9.5 out of 10
N/A
Edraw Max, from Wondershare, is an all-in-one diagram software designed to make it simple to create professional-looking flowcharts, organizational charts, network diagrams, business presentations, building plans, mind maps, science illustration, fashion designs, UML diagrams, workflows, program structures, web design diagrams, electrical engineering diagrams, directional maps, database diagrams and more.
Wondershare products are quite fresh in their approach and innovative. PDFelement also comes across as highly reliable product. I have practically replaced it as my default PDF management tool on Mac (much better over Preview, except Preview seems to load a tiny bit faster).
It's very easy to collaborate on the same file with team members and create simple concepts and flowcharts that you can use in the development process. It is also very handy for creating graphs and tables for presentations. Since this is a web application, we can use it anywhere, anytime and on any device; which provides great flexibility and accessibility. It also offers the functionality to save your work as you develop it, which is very helpful.
Draw.io offers a lot of shapes and customizability of how the diagrams are laid out. We've been able to create a lot of different things with it, and have barely scratched the surface of the sorts of things that we could do.
Draw.io is fairly intuitive in the way that you draw shapes and connect shapes together, I was able to figure it out without a tutorial.
Draw.io is fast and performant for me compared with some of the alternatives.
One element that was hard to use was converting pre-existing drawings and workflows from Gliffy to Draw.io once our company made the change. While we were able to complete the migration, when going back we noticed, oftentimes, some formatting and dependencies did not make it or were not compatible.
While the template repository is vast, it has a heavy focus on network style maps. It would be ideal for added diversity in the templates with a focus on workflows just as much.
While the integrations are strong, the cloud collaborative environment could still use some work. While you can save and edit in the cloud. Group editing and live dynamic sharing/editing similar to Microsoft office are still missing.
Draw.io could add some version control functionality for ease of rollback, auditing, & comparison.
The support for draw.io is pretty decent, considering it is a free website. I had a question one time when I was trying to do something, so I sent an email to their support email and got a response fairly quickly with an answer to my question. They also have some excellent support tools on their support website for helping you get more familiar with their program, and I found that very helpful.
Needed to contact the support team as I had lost license details. Their response was fast, professional and what's more, very helpful. All the needed data was sent to me and I was able to reinstall Wondershare EdrawMax again.
Draw.io is totally free and it has most of the features a commercial product like Visio would have, so I think it is a go-to. It has good integration with Google Drive and it can export to a variety of files. You are not constrained by some commercial proprietary file format. It can be used in a browser on any device or downloaded as a desktop app.
Obviously, Visio is considered the Gold standard, But you are locked into the MS ecosystem. Lucidchart felt less polished and cumbersome to use. ConceptDraw UI was a bit more cluttered and the learning curves were a bit step.