Microsoft 365 (formerly Office 365) is a Microsoft Cloud subscription service that includes Microsoft Office products (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, Outlook, Publisher, and Access). The software can be installed across multiple devices and ensures that users always have the most up-to-date version of the included Office applications.
$5
Per User Per Month
Microsoft Visio
Score 7.7 out of 10
N/A
Microsoft offers Visio, a diagramming tool for building flowcharts, diagrams (e.g. network diagrams), org charts and floor plans, available online as a subscription and also in enterprise level packages (e.g. Visio Professional).
$5
per month per user
Pricing
Microsoft 365
Microsoft Visio
Editions & Modules
Business Basic
$5.00
Per User Per Month
Individual
$5.84
*Per Month
Business - Apps
$8.25
Per User Per Month
Enterprise - F3
$10.00
Per User Per Month
Business Standard
$12.50
Per User Per Month
Business Premium
$20.00
Per User Per Month
Enterprise - E3
$32.00
Per User Per Month
Enterprise - E5
$57.00
Per User Per Month
Visio Plan 1
$5.00
per month per user
Visio Plan 2
$15.00
per month per user
Visio Standard 2024
$309.99
one-time fee On-premises diagramming solution, licensed for one PC
Visio Professional 2024
$579.99
one-time fee On-premises diagramming solution, licensed for one PC
I chose Microsoft 365 because the license includes cloud storage, which OpenOffice, even though it's free, doesn't offer. I also chose it for its customization capabilities for documents, spreadsheets, presentations, and other types of internal documents. In addition, it has …
Most other drawing tools were vendor specific and did not cover anything more than their specific products. Saving and exporting for use with other programs were also a challenge or non existent. Trying to find products that covered physical as well as logical were hard to find …
Microsoft Visio is a desktop app, while the ones mentioned are browser native apps, starting from here both work differently. Microsoft Visio is a great app for any company whether small, medium or large since there are so many use cases for it, and you can provide individual …
SmartDraw was a program that I used at a prior company before we migrated to Visio. It was not nearly as intuitive to use, and even though it is advertised to be able to offer easy import and export to Visio, when I would export it to a Visio file format and share it with a …
I have personally never used or evaluated other programs similar to Microsoft Visio. I started using it following an indication from a colleague who told me that our University distributes it free of charge to its users. Since I first used it (more or less three years ago), I …
Verified User
General Manager
Chose Microsoft Visio
Publisher is more generic and while it is able to do what we need, Microsoft Visio allows us to do the same thing using less time and higher accuracy with features like custom icon sets, ease of linking and maintaining links to denote work flows as well as scaling up without …
Visio has a larger library of predefined elements and diagrams for the user, and faster and more efficient ways of drawing diagrams. Users can draw diagrams that are more detailed. Furthermore, the diagrams are easier to scale up or down. The auto arrange process flows …
Visio is kind of in a class by itself (or Microsoft wouldn't have purchased the company way back in the 2000s) There have been a couple of competitors, but they really don't have the same functionality as Visio. I picked the upper and lower limit competitors Samrtdraw and Auto…
Visio does a great job with flowchart work. If you already have a subscription to Office 365, then its not much more to add to your current license. draw.io is a free service that you can use online, but it requires you to be online in order to use it at all.
Justinmind was a good graphics creator but not a process flow designer. Bizagi functions were so static and its interface was not very user-friendly. But in Visio, the interface was very user-friendly and has every sort of a template that a business analyst or a project manager …
Microsoft 365 would be well suited for medium to large enterprises. This is where there are several hundreds or thousands of people. Since most everyone has used one of the applications the learning curve would be reduced. Another reason would be the ability to implement security measures to prevent access to sensitive data. This could justify the cost of an Enterprise license.
Visio is by far and away the best tool that I have used to do Value Stream Mapping sessions with the warehouse I support. It has all of the shapes needed built in to be able to represent all areas of the processes. I also like how you are able to make the drawing as big as needed and when printing it out of Visio you have the ability to use the necessary paper size. The biggest complaint that I have with the software if how it can be cumbersome for non-Visio users (that is, people without a license in the orgnaization) to interact with the Visio Map. We normally have to dedicate one Visio SME to be able to make the changes that Process SME's find since they do not have access to the software.
Microsoft Visio is excellent for organizing thought processes related to our more complex research.
The diagrams created with Microsoft Visio are ideal for graphically displaying the internal organization of work and research groups through flow diagrams.
Microsoft Visio is a great tool for managing our students' activities by creating flowcharts that help us graphically visualize the steps of their group work.
When navigating through swim lanes, the user must be careful between switching from the point to the connection features as it can be difficult to remember which mode you’re in.
When drawing “decision points,” it can be difficult to type words like “yes” or “no” between the connection lines.
The exporting options aren’t ideal. They are hard to create in PDF format.
So far the Microsoft 365 platform provides features and tools that can cater to 100% of present organizations needs considering both technical and business necessities, however most features are not been effectively utilised at present. The current featureset is able to cover for most of the future needs of the business and technical functions.
We use Microsoft Visio to keep our diagrams updated and to that end we will need the subscription to keep using the software. Otherwise we will be left with PDF versions of the diagrams.
Microsoft 365 is the gold standard for performing project tasks in a professional environment, enabling the quick transfer and exchange of files and ideas for team members who work locally and remotely. Its suite of tools is familiar and has evolved to being cloud based, allowing for files to be updated in real time from near and far.
I have always struggled with some basics, such as connection points, object alignment, font consistency, arranging layers and their order (bring forward, send backward), and managing overlap. I usually need to create an initial rough draft and then do a separate cleanup pass to bring the diagram up to my quality standards. If I skip that step, the result generally does not look very good. And once a diagram becomes busy or the file gets large, Visio has been unstable for me in the past, including occasional crashes that caused non-recoverable edits.
To-date Microsoft 365 platform has offered an amazing uptime and availability percentage per year compared to all other products which provide the stability and overall business resilience of their ecosystem which is a great relief for information technology service entitites which heavy rely on Microsoft offerings as a whole to redeliver their own custom products
The Microsoft 365 tools expects and demands a substantial amount of system resources to operate at optimal level and even more when integrated with other applications which is a downside, however given that external supporting tech factors such as fibre/broadband speed bandwidth, high speed RAM and ample storage resources are allocated the tools work error free providing robust communication
Over the past 8 years of using Microsoft 365, I have noticed that they change vendors often. This always leads to a poor experience in the beginning, then levels out after some time for the company to get things worked out. As a customer, it is really frustrating because I don't have time when something isn't working to have them "look into my issue" and get back with me. They have even closed a ticket I specifically told them to keep open. Your applications are only as good as the support.
Overall, I feel that Microsoft's support is weak. They are now such a behemoth that their model of putting documentation online for their users to sift through is totally outgrown. Given the amount of money you pay for these licenses, Microsoft should provide easy one-on-one support for their products via email or chat. The idea of paying their rates for support incidents is ridiculous. If you have an enormous amount of time on your hands, use their support websites and you will eventually find a solution most of the time.
The resellers involved with selling Microsoft products are reluctant to provide in person specialist trainings to consumers due to the fact of costs of economies of scale and is not provided free of charge most of the time. In Person trainings needs to be agreed to at the initiation of projects and implementations for better ROI.
The standard training offered with 3rd part resellers are fairly standard and covers the basic workability however the trainings needs to be specifically customised according to unique requirements of the organizations. for example an MSP would need to master specific communications verticals within Microsoft 365 whereas and online store using Microsoft 365 would needs to master a different set of tools within the suite to get the best ROI post implementation.
The Microsoft support partners are more than capable of handling implementations and dealing with unprecedented errors during the implementations. Not part of the implementation though the setup was done with minimum misconfigurations which is evident with present live setup which works fine without any bugs and gaps at present context.
Typically I prefer working with companies with Microsoft 365 as their main tool because they're usually a fast growing company with a global presence. I like using it for work because it's easy to collaborate, share, review, comment, reply in any of the tools. The mobile app for Outlook and Teams are lifesavers when we're constantly traveling and you can join meetings on the mobile Teams to never miss a beat.
Even though it’s a more expensive solution, Vizio is built for the enterprise. Therefore, it integrates perfectly with our existing Microsoft stack, and quite frankly, because it’s such a more mature product, it provides exactly the functionality we need and expect.
Microsoft pricing is not very expensive and yet not very cheap as well, and it hovers in between the baseline. The charges are mostly based on the tier level partners who charge based on their individual reputation in the market. Power negotiation will lead to cost effective and attractive pricing
Multiple tools within the same platform have been deployed successfully within different functional technical and non technical teams such as Devops, SOC, NOC, Shared services, Managed services, Global Information technology, Cloud operations, Finance, Administration, human resources and all these teams collaborate while maintaining central uniformity in terms of global standards who are dispersed in different geographical locations with ease
Have not directly obtained professional services from Microsoft but rather obtained specialized services such as implementations and configurations, setting up and integration support with Microsoft authorized suppliers, 3rd parties, and resellers, which has been a pleasant experience. Again the level of delivery quality on professional services is based on the level of hands on exposure of the 3rd party
We have a lot of nonprofit users, so they have a good ROI.
I like the constant updates without having to purchase the software repeatedly.
I used to purchase each Office (insert year here) often, so the software was up to date and had the newest options and connectors. I think my return on investment would have been much better if Microsoft had updated those versions to keep them current; after all, we did pay for them.
Microsoft 365's offering a monthly fee or a discount for a year helps, and you can look at it as a free backup if you have everything set to back up to One Drive. (Cloud-based document filing you can access anywhere ( with an internet connection)—you Can't beat that!)
Reduces the amount of time I need to create process flow diagrams. In the past I would use Powerpoint or Word which required a lot more effort and time and never looked as good. Visio just takes that headache away.
Only negative is that I personally believe it should always have been part and parcel of the Office suite, thus giving more users the opportunity to use it rather than specifically having to justify its separate purchase within our organisation. Different now with Office 365 of course!
