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Creates Competent Content
February 01, 2019

Creates Competent Content

Michael Slavin | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Gliffy

We use Gliffy sporadically across the development teams. I personally use it when creating network architecture diagrams for customer-facing documents, and many developers have also created software architecture diagrams to create onboarding and reference documents for bringing new developers up to speed on the product.
  • Robust asset libraries to match legacy Visio documents or use familiar iconography from vendor documents/diagrams.
  • Integrates with Confluence to make diagramming within our internal wiki simple.
  • Decent fine-tuning of illustrations to match size/style constraints of documents (curve radius, text size, etc.)
  • Some simple tasks like creating basic elements can involve more work than you'd expect. There are no immediately apparent or customizable shortcuts or hotkeys for some common tasks.
  • Needs to have ways to limit the styling of a document. It can be tough to collaborate when someone else will, for example, use a different Firewall icon than the one you've been using.
  • For whatever reason it was an easier sell than getting everyone access to Visio. So it stopped us from getting hung up on a bottleneck of 1 or 2 licensed users.
  • It's allowed proactive developers to create valuable reference and training material. This moved us from relying on oral history to learn the architecture to having a single point of reference for new hires. This probably took a full day off of new hire onboarding.
Comparable. Not quite as slick but it accomplishes the core functionality just as well. At least with the version I've used, they're not mutually compatible, but it's not too tough to recreate Visio content in Gliffy.
I think it's a viable alternative to Visio for most use cases. It's not my preferred tool, but it's becoming a standard tool in the industry, and it fills that niche well. It will handle most diagrams and flowcharts well. It's great for one-off or internal docs where ultimate polish isn't really necessary. It's simple to use so it won't require training. It doesn't play well with source control so I don't like it for frequently revised documents. If you have folks making single-slide PowerPoint presentations just to use the illustration tools (UGH!), this is valuable. If the outputs are valuable parts of your collateral, this may not be quite robust enough.

Using Gliffy

20 - Predominantly software developers and tech writers.
One unfortunate person has ended up as the go-to for issues but we have no appreciable support structure.