essensys vs. OmniGraffle vs. SmartDraw

Great platform for a flexible office space company. However, as our company continues to grow, it may be interesting to see how scalable the platform is with the growth. Right now, each account is managed separately and we really should be able to consolidate that much more effectively.

Incentivized

As I said earlier in this review, OmniGraffle does an excellent job with arcs if they are created in OmniGraffle. The same is not true if the drawing I'm working on was imported from Visio. In that case, I need to just start all over with the arc lines, and that is not often a reasonable option.

Incentivized

As a developer i use it extensively for sharing ideas specially related for system design and application flows. Entire team finds it comfortable to use it, understand it and make changes swiftly. We use it for High Level System design. While discussing the only missing thing we find about it is the integration of an ide for Low Level Design but in my opinion this tool isn't made for that purpose.

Incentivized

• Internet access: most reliable within this space for us.
• Management of members when onboarding or offboarding, easy to add or remove users.
• High level of security: This is something that many of our members require.

Incentivized

• The ability to easily map out process flows for users of a wide range of tech comfort levels—The design is intuitive enough for even people with lower tech comfort levels to visually chart process flows. We have never had to do significant onboarding for less tech-savvy colleagues—this is a huge timesaver!
• Collaborative mind mapping—OmniGraffle is a great platform to get together with people and brainstorm ideas in the early stages of a project, then link ideas together to create visual relationships to inform business and product design decisions.
• Communicating strategy to stakeholders—Communicating the complexities of a workflow to stakeholders is a lot easier and more effective, with a diagram that clearly shows the relationships between factors rather than showing them a PowerPoint that, because of its slide-by-slide nature, makes it difficult to consistently show how different factors play into an overall workflow.

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

• Integrations: I wish that there were more integrations with other business software.
• Invoicing: The company often does not send invoices in time and we are forced to contact them.
• Auditing: Would be great if we could get a consolidated audit report across all locations instead of one per account.

Incentivized

• No support for team collaboration. I would really like to see a way to share files to iCloud so that others can access and edit.
• Better print settings. If you're trying to print a document across many pages, it's not easy to make this happen.
• No ability to pre-configure settings. For example, I have to manually change the unit of measure from "inches" to "pixels" when I create a new document, would like the ability to change that fundamentally.

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

Best product for my needs on the market

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

OmniGraffle is an excellent application for chart and diagrams development. Been using it for a while now and it's a multiple platform application.

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

I am not the most knowledgeable in this area.

Incentivized

Because we're primarily a Mac shop, Visio was a non-starter. (It's monstrously complex compared to OmniGraffle, which works against the quick-and-dirty just-enough-documentation ideal common on agile teams.) We've used draw.io on internal projects and when coordinating with external teams, but a web-based tool was too awkward for heavy use and bogged down with complex documents. For us, OmniGraffle sits in the "sweet spot" between complex data-driven modeling tools and lightweight "drawing" programs that force too much manual labor when doing heavy diagramming work.

Incentivized

As noted in first question, SmartDraw has them beat in every category I can think of (except for price; but need to keep in mind the old adage "you get what you pay for"!). This product allows for VASTLY-improved uploading of data than the Lucidchart product, and customer service is real, tangible service... they understand that when you have a question and need an answer, waiting 2 or 3 days for an email response is not acceptable.

Incentivized

• High cost per location (negative)
• Reliable (positive)
• Scalability (neutral)

Incentivized

• I've created multiple OmniGraffle template files that I use constantly. I create covers for our proposals in OmniGraffle with pictures of the the client's buildings or sites. All I need to do is drag and drop the image into the template, change the title and client name and address accordingly and it's ready to go.
• Using templates in OmniGraffle has saved lots of time.
• Using OmniGraffle to design drawing details for construction documents has allowed us to land projects, purchase orders and new clients to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars.

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