As Visio is Microsoft's commercial solution for professional diagramming and workflow drafting, it has many alternatives just like other parts of the Microsoft Office Suite. These alternatives share many of the features found in Visio, such as support for scalable vector graphics files so that your charts and diagrams don't suffer any loss in quality when resized.
If you would rather use alternatives to Visio that are free and web-based, there are viable options that can be used to replace Visio with minimal loss in functionality for major amounts of convenience.
Lucidchart is an online diagram and flowchart software that supports Microsoft Office Visio import and can work on any operating system. The easiest way to draw flowcharts, wireframes, UML diagrams, network diagrams, mind maps, iPhone mockups, site maps and more.
draw.io is a free online diagram drawing application for workflow, BPM, org charts, UML, ER, network diagrams. No login or registration are required and features include the ability to save locally (including svg), a range of stencils, .vsdx, Lucidchart and Gliffy import and real time diagram sharing.
yEd is a powerful diagram editor that can be used to quickly create diagrams manually or import external data for analysis and auto-magically arrange even large data sets by just pressing a button. You can use yEd to quickly create flow charts, BPMN and UML diagrams, organization charts, mind maps, and many other kinds of diagrams, graphs, and networks. Choose from a wide range of highly sophisticated layout algorithms to automatically arrange diagrams in no time.
Pencil is a standalone app or Firefox extension that lets you create diagrams or UI mockups. It doesn't have collaboration/multi-user features. The Pencil Projects unique mission is to build a free and opensource tool for making diagrams and GUI prototyping that everyone can use.
Dia is a GTK+ based diagram creation program for Linux, Unix, Mac OS X and Windows released under the GPL license. Dia is roughly inspired by the commercial Windows program Microsoft Office Visio, though more geared towards informal diagrams for casual use. It can be used to draw many different kinds of diagrams. It currently has special objects to help draw entity relationship diagrams, UML diagrams, flowcharts, network diagrams, and many other diagrams.
Draw lets you produce anything from a quick sketch to a complex plan, and gives you the means to communicate with graphics and diagrams. With a maximum page size of 300cm by 300cm, Draw is a an excellent package for producing technical drawings, general posters, and much else.
Lucidchart is an online diagram and flowchart software that supports Microsoft Office Visio import and can work on any operating system. The easiest way to draw flowcharts, wireframes, UML diagrams, network diagrams, mind maps, iPhone mockups, site maps and more.
PlantUML is an open-source tool that uses simple textual descriptions to draw UML diagrams. The generator can be run anywhere within JVM and integrated with various application such as wiki, text editor, IDE, programming language, documentation generator, and others. Mostly based on Graphviz. Can render various diagram syntax such as PlantUML, Dot, and Ditaa.
OmniGraffle can help you make eye-popping graphic documents—quickly—by providing powerful styling tools, keeping lines connected to shapes even when they’re moved, and magically organizing diagrams with just one click. Create flow charts, diagrams, UI and UX interactions, and more. Whether you need a quick sketch or an epic technical figure, OmniGraffle and OmniGraffle Pro keep it gorgeously understandable.
Creating flowcharts, organizational charts, business diagrams, science illustration, network diagrams, mind map and lots more.
Google Drawings, part of Google Drive , allows users to collaborate creating, sharing, and editing images or drawings. It can be used for creating charts, diagrams, designs, flow-charts, etc. It contains a subset of the features in Google Slides but with different templates. Its features include laying out drawings precisely with alignment guides, snap to grid, auto distribution, and inserting drawings into other Google documents, spreadsheets, or presentations.
Draw, part of the Apache OpenOffice suite, is a graphics editor that gives you the tools to communicate with visuals and diagrams. With a maximum page size of 300cm by 300cm, Draw is powerful tool for posters, graphs, charts, and more.
Create deep visual documents, adaptable and multi-level diagrams, flowcharts, concept maps, mind maps and models. Users can: - Define their own types of nodes and connectors, to reuse nomenclature, symbols, details structure. - Add Details to your Ideas (attachments, links, custom-fields, tables) - Ideas can have a whole new diagram inside (multilevel/composable) - Can generate a report for the whole Composition document. - Reports are exportable as PDF/XPS and to HTML.
UMLet is an open-source UML tool with a simple user interface: draw UML diagrams fast, export diagrams to eps, pdf, jpg, svg, and clipboard, share diagrams using Eclipse, and create new, custom UML elements. UMLet is a UML tool aimed at providing a fast way of creating UML diagrams. UML elements are modified using text input instead of pop-up dialogs. Elements can be modified and used as templates; this way, users can easily tailor UMLet to their modeling needs.
This software empowers users to construct, navigate, share, and criticize knowledge models represented as Concept Maps. The toolkit is platform independent and network enabled, allowing the users to build, and collaborate during the construction of concept maps with colleagues anywhere on the network, as well as, share and navigate through others models distributed on servers throughout Internet.
Grafio allows you to make flow charts, org charts, Venn diagrams, mind maps, take notes, sketches and do other diagrams. Everything is custom and modifiable. Grafio's shape recognition algorithm can detect basic shapes and redraw them. You feel free sketching your idea, as if your Device is a cocktail napkin but the result is smooth and professionally looking. You can even record an audio note to each shape. Afterwords You can easily share it with your friends.
StarUML is a program to develop fast, flexible, extensible, featureful, and freely-available UML/MDA platform running on Win32 platform. The goal of the StarUML project is to build a software modeling tool and also platform that is a compelling replacement of commercial UML tools such as Rational Rose, Together and so on.
"If they could see what Im thinking, they'd get it!" People just understand faster with pictures. It helps them see how information is connected, whether it is complete, and how a shift in one element impacts something else. Its simpler to grasp when you can see the connections and test "what if" scenarios. Take complex information and organize it visually with simple drag and drop ease.
Umbrello UML Modeller is a Unified Modelling Language diagram programme for KDE. UML allows you to create diagrams of software and other systems in a standard format.
Diagramo is an online flowchart software - diagrams (create, edit and share) - organization charts (create, edit and share) - network diagrams (create, edit and share) - graphs (create, edit and share)
Calligra Flow is an easy to use diagramming and flowcharting application with tight integration to the other Calligra applications. It enables you to create network diagrams, organisation charts, flowcharts and more.
Visto is a tool which provides efficiency to your business and your team through flows and forms. Visto turns every process in a step-by - step verification, facilitating the execution of each step, and avoiding noise in understanding the steps. Visto app is driven to boost your and your team productivity, organizing processes and increase the efficiency of your business.
Cacoo is a user-friendly online diagramming tool that allows you to create a variety of diagrams such as wireframes, flowcharts, UML diagrams, network diagrams, mindmaps, sitemaps, database diagrams, and more.
Lightweight, powerful, easy to use, UML tool Software Ideas Modeler is a lightweight and powerful CASE tool. It supports UML 2.2 diagrams and a lot of other ones. Software Ideas Modeler is freeware (for non-commercial use). Commercial user may use this software only after buying a license. - Easy and fast drawing: auto alignment, layouts, grid, auto scrolling - UML 2.
Simple vector graphics editor for creating flowcharts, UML class diagrams, illustrations and slide shows.
Shapes is an elegant Diagramming app for Mac OS X, that is both simple and powerful. Shapes gives you all of the most important features you need in a Diagramming tool without all the extra cruft, at an affordable price. Shapes is great for Programmers and Web Designers looking for a simple tool for quickly designing Charts, laying out Wireframes, or visualizing Model Relationships.
