Item: draw.io
Rating: 9
Author: Pankaj Bhowmik

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

In my group, we use draw.io vastly for drawing flowcharts, diagram, or illustrations. We further use these drawing to write papers and projects. This tool is a smart choice for users since it is free to use. Moreover, there are some paid drawing-software and there are some people who got used to those. Besides these guys, most of us in the dept use draw.io. My group consists of researchers and we have no collaboration in terms of business. In my opinion, there should not be significant objections regarding the draw.io. Yes, security might be a concern for business purpose where they may claim that their confidential design could be on the web portal.

Pros and Cons

This is a fully online dependent tool, easy to use, and free. At the same time, we can share the design with the people in a group. This feature gives a good match for teamwork.
This tool has a large collection of shapes. These shapes are possible to organize easily. If a high level of perfection is required, then it can be controlled by placing proper (x,y) coordinate or rotating by a specific angle.
You can have multiple pages on one webpage. It makes easier to edit, modify and update your file which is helpful to track different versions and projects (if you use draw.io a lot).
This is a great tool for researchers. Draw.io and Overleaf help to write research papers. When a PDF format of the image is exported, it gives good drawing quality.
This online tool is more flexible and user-friendly compared to other expensive software.

The tool is not efficient for adding 3D effect on the shapes.
The drawing quality degrades when JPG or PNG image formats are downloaded. The SVF format also has some problems for universal use. Hence, when you use Microsoft Word and try to put in an image, you might have to sacrifice image quality.
It is limited to shapes only, it would be nice to have a graph option.
The online integration of with Overleaf could be better.

Return on Investment

I am not a business guy. For myself, the positive things are:
I can draw figures easily.
I can put them in PowerPoint with good resolution for presentations.
Export them in a PDF format to put in latex which gives me the best illustration and clarity of my drawing.
It is handy to use and it takes me a very short time to draw my required figures compared to other tools.