OmniGraffle — The sweet spot for diagramming and visual tech communications
March 14, 2019
OmniGraffle — The sweet spot for diagramming and visual tech communications
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with OmniGraffle
We're a full strategy/design/development shop, and our team is heavily tilted towards Macs. Although the design team has shifted to production-focused tools like Sketch for most of their early stage deliverables, the Strategy team makes heavy use of Omnigraffle for wireframing, roughing out and documenting content models and site maps, etc. On the development site, most of our architects have settled on Omnigraffle for technical diagramming as well — it's not the 800lb Visio gorilla, but it does everything we need it to.
- 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.
- Standardizing on Omnigraffle for our internal diagramming (and at least some of our client deliverables) has made it possible for consultants and technical architects to produce high-quality support materials even when designers don't have time to produce "final" versions.
Because we're primarily a Mac shop, Visio was a non-starter. (It's monstrously complex compared to OmniGraffle, which works against the quick-and-dirty just-enough-documentation ideal common on agile teams.) We've used draw.io on internal projects and when coordinating with external teams, but a web-based tool was too awkward for heavy use and bogged down with complex documents. For us, OmniGraffle sits in the "sweet spot" between complex data-driven modeling tools and lightweight "drawing" programs that force too much manual labor when doing heavy diagramming work.