aToad #30: draw.io / diagrams.net

FLOSS (Apache-2.0) software to make flowcharts, workflows, UML graphs, etc

Remember about Dia? Or about BOUML and its (epic and messy) history? Did you end up using Inkscape, LibreOffice Draw, or worse Google Draw because those weren’t really that convenient?

Well, I recently had enough of all these and looked again. I quickly found draw.io (aka diagrams.net, its new name). It’s based on Electron, which I’m generally not a fan of, but which in this case (UI-centric software, basically no backend) makes perfect sense. It also allows them to provide a web version, so you can give it a try without installing it.
Since I mentioned installing, another thing is that they provide both an installer and a “no installer” version. I didn’t try the latter, but I suspect it’s one of those Electron default craps that dump installed files into %AppData%, while the installer is, for once, a “normal” installer that lets you choose where to install (and that’s pretty much the only choice you need to do while running it).

The software itself is convenient, I find it easier to use than Dia. It comes with a bunch of templates, none of which I used but that gave me a look at all the various styles of diagrams that can be created with it. They include lots of commonly used pictures: for instance for AWS (Amazon Web Service), which I have to use at work, they include basically the icons of every service, which is great to make infrastructure workflows. They have the same for Azure and Google Cloud, also icons for MariaDB, MySQL, PHP, Apache, etc. Long story short, you probably won’t ever have to import your own pictures, unless you really want to.

I can’t share a screenshot because all I have at the moment is a workflow from work, but again you can just try it online directly. You can even view the templates there, only they don’t jump at your face by default, so if you want to see them you need to go to File -> New, and there you’ll get the templates.