Overview
What is OmniGraffle?
OmniGraffle is a wireframing tool for Mac users.
Perfect Diagram and Chart Development Application
OmniGraffle: A Robust Diagramming Solution for Many User Types
OmniGraffle — The sweet spot for diagramming and visual tech communications
THE diagramming software tool for OS X
Easy way to outline concepts you need to communicate to others
OmniGraffle is simply the best choice for modelling on the Mac
Omnigraffle is a good, if limited, tool
Is there still a place for OmniGraffle in your design flow?
Omnigraffle, a good tool for writers and songwriters
Great tool for behind-the-scenes
OmniGraffle - Great for flowcharts, and information architecture
For diagramming any abstract ideas or complex interactions, Omnigraffle is way to go.
Great product with untapped potential
Omnigraffle for Flows and basic wireframing
Pricing
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
Loading Omnigraffle Diagram into CLIPS rule engine
SVG Animation Demo
Brief Demo of Omnigraffle
OmniGraffle 6 Mind Map Demo
Product Details
- About
- Tech Details
What is OmniGraffle?
OmniGraffle Technical Details
Operating Systems | Unspecified |
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Mobile Application | No |
Comparisons
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Reviews and Ratings
(50)Community Insights
- Business Problems Solved
- Recommendations
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:
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Test the software using the trial period before purchasing to determine if it meets your needs and if it is easy to use.
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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.
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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
(1-8 of 8)- 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.
- 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.
Easy way to outline concepts you need to communicate to others
- 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.
Is there still a place for OmniGraffle in your design flow?
- 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.
Omnigraffle, a good tool for writers and songwriters
- 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.
Great tool for behind-the-scenes
- 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).
If you're looking to create really beautiful deliverables, this probably isn't the best tool for the job.
- 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.
However, it's less appropriate to create high-fidelity mock up screens to share final designs and ideas in design phase.
My thoughts on Omnigraffle
- Creating hierarchy diagrams
- It's quick to open, throw ideas down and interact with.
- Too many options
- It is hard to style diagrams
- It is sometimes too linear