Likelihood to Recommend Omnigraffle is great for documentation, mapping, flowcharting, and other technical diagramming scenarios. It's simple enough to bang out a quick illustration and powerful enough to build complex blueprints for complicated technical systems. If you need cross-platform compatibility, though, you're probably better off looking elsewhere. If you want complex integration with data sources (ala Visio's SQL Server integration for shape metadata), OmniGraffle also falls short — but those scenarios are few and far between in my experience.
Read full review Well suited:
Organizing information. Doing research. Organizing goals. Planning tasks. Planning meetings. Structure for writing documents. Less appropriate:
Sharing documents among the teams/multiple users. General-purpose infographics. Writing longer paragraphs in the note field is very limited. Integration with GitHub. Integration with Confluence. XMind uses a proprietary document format which is not indexed by search programs on a PC or a Mac. This means that one cannot search in the content of the XMind documents. Read full review Pros OmniGraffle is fairly simple to use, but the one thing I think it does best is working with curved lines, particularly if you are using some of the available arc templates. Drop an arc onto your page, then tell it the dimensions it needs to be, and viola! Done. Manipulating the arcs is as simple as clicking and dragging offset points. OmniGraffle has also done an excellent job in stirring up the creative minds of many people who create templates and tools to work with OmniGraffle (not that Microsoft hasn't done so either), and managed to get the bulk of those into well organized repositories. What it all boils down to for me is: it just works. One doesn't need to have a computer science degree to work with it either. It is as simple or complex as you want it to be. Read full review User interface. User experience. .Simplification Enables digital write up. Read full review Cons There could be more scaffolding to support new users in getting to know how to best use all of the many features and tools it provides. There could be more support for printing. Many of our process flows extend beyond just one page, and OmniGraffle is rather finicky about printing multipage documents. We could use this tool more effectively if there was the ability to have real-time team collaboration. Document handoffs can be a point of missed communication, so it’d be great if we could ever have the option of working together in the same place at the same time. Read full review Sharing documents among the teams. Plugins for the tool that can enhance functionality. Better printed output for large mindmaps. Faster updates to new versions. Read full review Likelihood to Renew Best product for my needs on the market
Read full review Support Rating OmniGraffle is an excellent application for chart and diagrams development. Been using it for a while now and it's a multiple platform application.
Read full review The support around a bug in the tool which prevented the correct printing of diagrams. Support came back after a few days, and there was no workaround. Eventually, the bug was fixed in a future release. The company does not pay much attention to user forums. With better support and plugin mechanism for user contributions, the product would be more convincing.
Read full review Alternatives Considered To sum up:
use Omnigraffle for diagraming or for quick wireframe drafting use Sketch for more in-depth wireframing that you can then flesh out into a high fidelity mock-up, export assets for production, and integrate with prototyping tools like Proto.io and UXPin . Read full review It has a different form.
Trello is good for task management. Xmind will give an overall connection between different tasks and how all the tasks interconnect to each other. The reminder function in
Trello is good to keep track. However, a bird's eye view in Xmind will put conversations into context, and ease the navigation of any discussions.
Read full review Return on Investment Instrumental in smoothly transitioning a 3rd party development team from designs to requirements. Across cultures, US, Chinese, and Icelandic, OmniGraffle allowed our teams to speak the same language. The depth of the software make some elements that are useful less accessible than they should be. Read full review Increased productivity of employees. Provided structure and clear thought processes. Reusable content. Read full review ScreenShots