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OmniGraffle

OmniGraffle

Overview

What is OmniGraffle?

OmniGraffle is a wireframing tool for Mac users.

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Recent Reviews

TrustRadius Insights

OmniGraffle is a versatile tool that users heavily rely on for a wide range of tasks. One key use case for the product is wireframing, …
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Pricing

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What is OmniGraffle?

OmniGraffle is a wireframing tool for Mac users.

Entry-level set up fee?

  • No setup fee

Offerings

  • Free Trial
  • Free/Freemium Version
  • Premium Consulting/Integration Services

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Product Demos

Generating a site map in one minute with OmniGraffle - Demo

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Loading Omnigraffle Diagram into CLIPS rule engine

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SVG Animation Demo

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Brief Demo of Omnigraffle

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OmniGraffle 6 Mind Map Demo

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Product Details

What is OmniGraffle?

OmniGraffle Technical Details

Operating SystemsUnspecified
Mobile ApplicationNo
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Comparisons

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Reviews and Ratings

(50)

Community Insights

TrustRadius Insights are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, 3rd-party data sources. Have feedback on this content? Let us know!

OmniGraffle is a versatile tool that users heavily rely on for a wide range of tasks. One key use case for the product is wireframing, roughing out, and documenting content models and site maps. This is particularly useful for the strategy team, as they can easily create workflow diagrams and produce detailed annotations that are difficult to convey via a prototype. Additionally, OmniGraffle addresses low visibility issues in web projects by allowing users to create flowcharts, behavioral flows, and site map trees.

The software serves as an excellent replacement for Visio, offering better visuals and flexibility in wireframing and design activities. Users utilize OmniGraffle to create process flow diagrams, business flow charts, and other diagrams required by their company or department. Moreover, it is used beyond traditional design purposes, with users leveraging the tool to structure texts such as lyrics, poetry, or novels to find the best flow and logic in their thematic elements.

OmniGraffle's flexible and large format medium makes it ideal for mapping out ideas and concepts that require content organization, such as messaging frameworks. Furthermore, it is a popular choice for technical documentation purposes where technical diagrams need to be created. The software also facilitates collaboration across teams by enabling the creation of workflow diagrams that can be easily shared with non-design stakeholders.

For website projects, OmniGraffle helps users chart out website and user flows through flow charts and information architecture. It plays a significant role during the discovery phase of understanding user needs and customer journey by visualizing user flows, basic journey maps, brainstorming sessions, and visual note-taking. Furthermore, designers rely on OmniGraffle to build wireframe sketches that are shared with clients during the initial project phase.

Overall, OmniGraffle offers a comprehensive set of features that cater to various industries and use cases. Its ability to address different visualization needs makes it a valuable tool for wireframing, diagramming, and content organization.

Users recommend the following:

  1. Test the software using the trial period before purchasing to determine if it meets your needs and if it is easy to use.

  2. Consider alternative tools for drag and drop features and pre-made high-fi widgets. Also, explore more powerful options for flowcharts and business logic charts.

  3. Seek answers on blogs and YouTube videos in addition to relying solely on the provided documentation and tutorials. Study the smaller hot keys and tricks in Omnigraffle for better productivity. Try other tools like Adobe Illustrator or Balsamiq Mockups depending on the type of work you do. Additionally, consider Keynote, InVision, or Foundation/HTML for a more efficient workflow.

Overall, users appreciate Omnigraffle's value for money and its capabilities in wireframing, data modeling, and building flow diagrams. However, they encourage potential users to thoroughly evaluate their specific needs before investing in any tool.

Attribute Ratings

Reviews

(1-17 of 17)
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Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
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.
  • 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.
Jeff Eaton | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • For us, mapping and content model documentation are Omnigraffle's sweet spot. It has enough presentation/styling control to ensure a clean, consistent look that's compatible with the rest of our corporate branding, but lets us focus on the core challenge of communicating complicated relationships and processes to stakeholders.
  • For wireframing, a few specific features make OmniGraffle particularly useful. Its "sketch" line and fill styles make it easy to throw together some boxes-and-lines mockups that convey basic layout and priority decisions about a new design without implying a particular stylistic treatment. For higher fidelity mockups, it supports a large library of free and commercial UI shapes for OSX, IOS, Android, Windows, Bootstrap, and generic Web sites. Building out a set of shapes/components for quick wireframing and sharing them across an organization is easy, too.
  • Although the large library of reusable "shapes" makes it possible to build stuff like entity-relationship diagrams, flowcharts, and UML diagrams, it lacks Visio's ability to alter a shape's appearance/behavior by adding metadata to the shape itself. (I.E., changing color when a shape has a particular tag added to it). It is possible to add metadata to shapes, and OmniGraffle's advanced scripting support makes it possible to make custom plugins that automate color/style changes, but baking data-driven features right into the app would be a welcome addition.
  • Import/Export has improved dramatically over the past several versions, but export in formats like SVG and DXF is still a little too fussy to use for precise CAD work. If you need to spit out PDFs, PNGs, and occasionally import/export simple Visio files, it's fine.
  • Although OmniGraffle has a solid iPad version, exchanging files between the desktop and iOS versions requires "OmniSync," a passable but clunky file-sharing solution that's specific to Omni* products. I understand that Apple makes it difficult for non-App-Store products to use iCloud effectively, but it's still disappointing.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • 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.
  • The ability to import Visio drawings is important to a lot of people. However, if one is importing a Visio drawing that has a complex arcs in it, they are not going to import properly. You end up with a drawing in OmniGraffle that doesn't look like it does in Visio - the arc lines are all off.
  • If one has a very complex diagram that needs to fit on one page but extends close to the margins, you could end up getting a little frustrated because the program keeps wanting to drag another page into the fray.
  • It may be something very simple to do, but I haven't yet found out how to specify exact page sizes for my drawings. If I just take the default, I'll get an 8/5" x 11" portrait page and have to focus on ensuring everything fits right. On the other hand, if I create a large page to start with because I know it isn't all going to fit on one letter-size page, resizing the page when I'm done is not a pretty picture.
John Rougeux | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • Mind mapping. You can easily link ideas together and OmniFocus can automatically arrange them in a presentable format.
  • Wireframing. If you're working on simple design concepts, it's a great way to show ideas to designers.
  • Outlining process flows. If you're outlining a process, such as marketing automation, it's perfect.
  • 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.
Matt Railey | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • Creating diagrams and workflows
  • Creating Static Wire frame drawings
  • Creating Specification documentation for an application
  • There is no capability for creating prototype or interactions, I've starting moving away from using Omnigraffle for wire frames for this reason as there are other tools that accomplish this while enabling interactive features.
  • It is difficult to create charts
  • Stability isn't where I'd like it to be. Although I don't ever lose much work due to how MacOS autosaves regularly, I do see crashes and weird glitches more often than I do when using my other productivity tools.
Kirk Brote | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • Annotations - OG excels!
  • It is a very easy tool for users to ramp up on.
  • The ability to script and export assets from the tool is excellent.
  • It would be nice to be able to export screen assets directly to InVision.
  • I wish coding interactivity in OG was easier and simpler.
  • I wish the tool intrinsically understood the distinction between screens and annotations without having to add actions or settings.
Fred ALPI | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • Structuring a novel is a very difficult exercise, as it is the basis on which everything will be built. Omnigraffle allows you to visualize a dramatic progression, and keep in mind the various references and situations I want to see appearing throughout the history I'm writing.
  • It is often important to switch phrases or select different verses in a song, Omnigraffle makes it easy to visualize the different options.
  • Promotion is a vital part in the life of artistic projects. Creating a strategy and explaining it is easier when you can have a more flexible tool than PowerPoint for example.
  • Well, let's dream and imagine a 3D version of the software, which would allow you to have different points of view on a situation.
  • Several panels on the same page would be nice in order to compare different versions of a project.
  • A historical visualization of the evolution of a project would be nice too.
Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • Diagram creation - It's easy to make and organize various boxes.
  • Wireframing - The use of guides helps keep everything aligned. The multiple pages helps keep all the screens in a project organized.
  • Brainstorming - It's possible to quickly draw up a digital representation of a pathway or user journey to share with my team.
  • The interface could be more beautiful.
  • OmniGraffle isn't quite as intuitive or beginner-friendly as some other design tools (e.g., Sketch 3).
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • Flow charts. You can set up a grid and import libraries.
  • User Journey. You can map out how a user will interact with a website. Everything is click and drag, and creating arrows etc. is fast and easy.
  • I use the arrows function a lot, and I find it is very particular. I wish the process was easier. If i don't use OmniGraffle for a month or two and come back I feel like I need to learn it again.
  • I'd like to auto-resize things according to the grid I set. Perhaps this is already a feature?
  • How a file is saved is actually a bit confusing at first. It always saves copies I think?
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • There are good templates that I can use.
  • Easy to create and modify objects, text, and arrows.
  • Converting from Omnigraffle to other formats which make it easy to use the contents anywhere.
  • Cost is a bit expensive.
  • Sync with other wireframing, prototyping, graphic tools would be great. Specifically, if it can be converted to .ai or .svg (vector graphic tool) to customize the look and feel of diagrams more, then that would be great.
  • Collaboration & real-time feedback sharing functionality would be great.
Adeleye Lufadeju | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • Great template interface that one can drag and drop onto the canvas.
  • Very quick and easy to use interface that I would consider a low learning curve unlike others.
  • Would like to have more dynamic interaction tools that cover all that happens in the digital sphere from mobile, web page, or even touch.
  • More high end professional template assets. Simply improve the UI designs for most and keeping them current with what is being considered modern.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • Wireframing
  • Quickly getting down UX flows
  • Easily document and share information architecture
  • More detailed mods and plugins!
  • Ability to share mocks with non-omnigraffle users. Possible a way to publish a wireframe to a url that I could send to clients or engineers
  • More options to animate/visually describe transitions
Jeffrey Young | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • Diagrams flowcharts: you can do anything that Visio does, only quicker, easier, and better looking.
  • Wireframing: while I prefer other tools now, Omnigraffle has a robust user community and offers free/paid widget sets for web, mobile, and desktop application wireframes.
  • Basic interactions: Omnigraffle allows for masters and basic hotspot interactions. If you only need to show simple functionality, Omnigraffle can work.
  • Interactions: each new visual must be on a completely new page (as of version 5). There isn't a good way to set up simple on-page interactions (i.e. show/hide of a widget).
  • Defaults: while the default setting for the widgets are nice looking, they can look a little cartoony sometimes.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • Placeholders! I love how there are endless stencils to choose from and download for OmniGraffle.
  • I love how easy it is to connect elements in OmniGraffle down to the pixel. The connectors are also helpful when building flowcharts and user stories for user experience.
  • The double click to enter text on any shape makes it super convenient to quickly put together a flow chart! I love that I do not need to create a shape and then drop in a text box and place it over the shape to enter text.
  • One feature i would love to see on OmniGraffle is the ability to see the pixel distance when I'm trying to place shapes next to each other. Working in UX, i'm always trying to wireframe down to the pixel, this gives the client and the other departments a clearer understanding of how the end product dimensions will look like.
  • Preloaded digital platform dimensions would be great. I know there are stencils we can use, but it would be great if i can click on a new canvas and choose between iPhone 6, iPad, desktop 1024, etc. It would make the prototype process much easier when I'm design for these platforms.
  • A bigger canvas. Why not have a unlimited canvas so I can build user flows without always having to readjust the canvas size. I like to open the program and just dive right in and start designing without spending time trying to guess how big the canvas should be.
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