Creately vs. SmartDraw vs. Stack Overflow for Teams

Creately sells itself as software specializing in a wide variety of areas, which is true in some cases. Visualizing and creating marketing processes, research, user flows, and general flowcharts is an extremely powerful tool. However, in other areas, such as Human Resources, UI/UX prototyping, and Wireframe design, it leaves a little to be desired compared to the competition.

Incentivized

I believe SmartDraw is a great tool for small- to mid-sized organizations for simplifying the production and management of org charts. We've also had the PMO experiment with the use of some of their flow charts as well. If an organization has an HCM with the capability of producing (good!) org charts, that is likely the best option... but many that I have used in my 30-year HR career don't. So there is definitely a need for SmartDraw in the market!

Incentivized

In my opinion, Stack Overflow for Teams is well suited for an organization that is on a hiring spree for the engineering teams. The reason for it is because instead of catering to doubts of new joinees individually, they can be asked to refer to the Stack Overflow and hence will save a lot of time for both new joiners as well as the existing employees.

Incentivized

• Helps to create wonderful charts.
• Helps co-worker to work on a similar project.
• It allows importing multiple templates.

Incentivized

• Provides examples to work off of--these are helpful when you don't know exactly where to start.
• Provides a number of stylistic options without making things too complex, so you can be creative without getting overwhelmed.
• Provides a wide variety of templates, meets a wide variety of needs.

Incentivized

• Sharing technical solutions to problems we encounter in our internal development environment.
• Sharing best practices we find in external resources.
• Discussions on design patterns and conventions we can use in our projects.

Incentivized

• Can add more tutorials to guide the users in the tool
• Tools lags sometimes when a diagram with lot of data is loaded
• It also gets stuck sometime when an Undo functionality is used

Incentivized

• A month-to-month plan would be ideal for users that don't have a need to create many projects
• The sidebar navigation can be a little confusing with all of the tools listed.
• Offering customizable plans with only the feature you need would simplify navigation

Incentivized

• I would recommend an increased engineering focus on the Microsoft Teams integration.
• It would be nice to make more medals.
• Easier ways to earn points.

Incentivized

I rated 8 because its simple to use and easy to create network topologies quickly. I liked the drag and drop option which makes designing the network topology and flow chart easier. In general its does what it needs to.

Incentivized

It definitely could be better, but it may also depend on the type of license you are subscribing to.

Incentivized

They are always very helpful, we get computers every two years and I have to call them to move the license from one computer to another and they do it with a smile in their voice!

Incentivized

Creately is a more intuitive solution and has better looking elements, shapes etc.

Incentivized

We have used Corel Draw and Adobe Acrobat. Both of those tools were good when they came out but the abilities of SmartDraw far outweigh both those tools. Corel Draw was also more complex to operate and do tasks, as was Adobe Acrobat in which some basic tasks took additional steps to complete.

Incentivized

It's easier to use Stack Overflow for Teams Q&A to maintain our knowledge base over time, over the Confluence wikis that we also maintain. You don't need to bother about folders, filenames, templates - just ask a question and answer it or get it answered. It feels less formal, so developers feel more free to add content.

Incentivized

• We were able to save a lot of time in visualizing strategic processes.
• We saved meeting time by simply showing our workflows and keeping our coworkers in the loop.

Incentivized

• SmartDraw has provided good return for our internal purposes. Using it to understand an organization's structure and inner workings has been valuable. On the client side, creating steps and businesses processes has also been a big plus. It has helped decrease confusing reporting structures and has provided a detailed map for individuals to understand where they fit within their organization.
• Unfortunately, SmartDraw has been somewhat inefficient with some of the more complex projects on our plate and has really deterred certain employees from even wanting to use it.

Incentivized

• It makes the search for answers more efficient, so devs can focus in more important things.
• Knowledge is not lost, even if people leave the company.

Incentivized