yEd Graph Editor

I came to this about 10 years ago, went away after a few uses, then came back to it having tried some other apps, and have been using it steadily for 5+ years. This is an excellent graphing tool. For quickly creating a simple diagram to explain something, or to produce an elaborate diagram for an evolving design, this is pretty good. I run it on Windows and Linux and there is no problem with moving between the OS. Stability is good as well. I'd definitely pay money for this app.

Like: Fantastic tool to get the job done! Simple no frills.

Down: The lines sometimes become angled. This causes the OCD part of me really nervous. I like my flowchart lines at right angles.

Great free software, now with online version!

This straightforward and clean program makes it really easy to create nice looking graphs that are properly aligned and arranged. I used it to make almost all of the diagrams in my PhD dissertation, except for the graphs which were made with R (another excellent but totally different tool, along with RStudio).

The UI is sometimes a bit clunky, but for the most part everything is smooth and logical, and the automatic layout options are very powerful. One of my favourite features in yEd is graph distance colouring, where you can set up a gentle fade or other colour transition along a tree of nodes.

[Edited by DestyNova, November 16]

The only graphing application I've used that actively helps you think through and manage complexity. I've tried lots from Visio to Omnigraffle to Sketch to MindManager, etc. Usually they help you add node and node, while the diagram gets more and more complex - until it finally gets unusably complicated, and abandoned!

yEd is great for creating and exploring complex hierarchies - and especially exploring as your create. You can add boxes, figure what they join to, then focus (in the 'Neighborhood' and related views) on just that node and it closest neighors (or successors/predecessors). This lets you revisit and review tiny chunks of the diagram at a time, seeing clearly what they require and what they create.

Hello,

I've been using yEd now since third semester. I'm studying information systems at the Hochschule der Medien in Stuttgart. Right now I've finished my bachelor thesis.

yEd have always been useful to me. In my study-time I used it mainly for modelling UML, eEPK and BPMN 2.0.1. But during my bachelor thesis yEd was especially helpful to me. The bachelor thesis was about process modeling for homogenization of the IT architecture. So, process modelling and IT-Architecture obviously played a big part in it. For this purpose I used the BPMN 2.0.1 modelling notation and the process support map, which is subarea of the software cartography.

I don't know which tool I would have used instead of yEd for my purpose. As a student I'm really happy to have such a powerful tool as yEd, not to mention that it is for free!

So, thank you yEd for providing this tool for all uf us. Keep up the good work so that more students like me can use it to get their bachelor's degree!

Sincerely

Atith Songtham

but else I don't think very highly of it. It's lacks kind of in sexyness, or to put in other words the graphs and UML you are drawing are very simple and not good looking, nothing you like to show a client. But between programmers it is a good choice, well it is free and everybody can get it...

Might work for you if you work in one of the officially sanctioned fields (UML, computer networks, etc), but if you need some flexibility to get it to work with diagrams from a different field, you quickly realize that everything appears to be hardcoded.
The very first thing I needed was a triangle pointing to the right.

Impossible to obtain.

For my use case, that's a deal breaker.

Its free, powerfull, beautiful,easy to use and I´m amazed that I can build a customized XSLT to use to import a XML file. That´s awesome!!!

hmm, It says that it's open source, however I'm unable to find a download link for the source. I'm interested in creating a plugin to export my Graph into a specialized format

I really like the way the Programm works in general, it is intuitv and easy to use and the digram one creats is not really restricted in form or size.
Unfortunatly it is next to unusable for me, because there is no way to enter formulas directly. You can either copy and paste Unicodesymbols and if necassary arrange them with html (look a littel bit funny sometimes, but readable) or create in an external program from latexcode an SVG, which then can be use in yEd. Both way to time consuming when nearly a half of your diagram need formulas...

[Edited by rakswin, October 31]

I have looked at several diagramming and mind-mapping tools, including some of the most popular, and found most of them tedious or frustrating in various ways.
Having just found yEd I am already impressed with many aspects:

• its versatility: it seems easy to do what I want, without yEd making assumptions about what that is, or constraining me to a particular style (which mindmapping tools often do)
• its ease of use: Many tools leave me thinking 'But I just want to ... , why is it so awkward to do?' Not so with yEd.
• Its logic: This is what makes me enjoy it. Somehow it all makes sense - more than most other tools. There's a clear logical mind behind yEd.

My choice for many years now. I even to class diagrams, workflows, etc. I love it!

It is actually very good and useful graphic tool but what it misses which is important to any graphic tool is, real measurement for example, how you can draw the diagram having base 2.7 inches and height 3.4 inches on letter page size (8.5*11 inches) so that if you print page you see real sized diagram.
It will be better if you check for this.