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Draw.io: Online Diagramming Website

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Re: Draw.io: Online Diagramming Website

#121

Post by tverbeure »

thayne wrote: post #119
mikepurvis wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a fan as well. My org ended up dropping our draw.io intergration in Confluence in favour of Lucidchart; I'm still not really sure why as it appears to be worse in functionality as well as slower and more tied to a cloud backend.

In what ways is Lucidchart worse in functionality? (disclaimer: employee of Lucid Software)

At some point, I actually paid for LucidChart for a year.

Last time I used it, before switching to draw.io, it became slow to the point of being unusable once you had a few pages in a document. And I was making an animation where each page showed the next step in a process, so there were a lot of pages.

This was a couple of years ago, so things may have changed since.

My diagrams may have a bunch of elements on them, but I don't think I use any advanced features (irrespective of whether it's Visio, LucidChart or draw.io). From that perspective, these isn't much difference between any of these programs, so there's just no reason to use a paid product.

Re: Draw.io: Online Diagramming Website

#122

Post by abainbridge »

thayne wrote: post #119
mikepurvis wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a fan as well. My org ended up dropping our draw.io intergration in Confluence in favour of Lucidchart; I'm still not really sure why as it appears to be worse in functionality as well as slower and more tied to a cloud backend.

In what ways is Lucidchart worse in functionality? (disclaimer: employee of Lucid Software)

Dragging the canvas around with the middle mouse button seems much more intuitive in draw.io to me.

Re: Draw.io: Online Diagramming Website

#123

Post by jxramos »

newprint wrote: post #27

Ok, just a note to everyone ! It is online service and your diagrams are stored in the "cloud" and you have zero control over it. Please, do not post your company's secret in form of diagrams. Recently, we caught one of the contractors using Draw.io to make diagrams of brand new systems that we are designing(we are fortune 40 company). System is expensive, very sensitive.

Just out of curiosity can someone point me to the basis for the claim that diagrams are uploaded to some cloud storage? I've used the tool and had the impression that it was all client side in memory DOM stuff until I downloaded my diagram. I never looked if some of the content gets pushed elsewhere, how would I substantiate these claims?

Re: Draw.io: Online Diagramming Website

#124

Post by ska »

thayne wrote: post #119
mikepurvis wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a fan as well. My org ended up dropping our draw.io intergration in Confluence in favour of Lucidchart; I'm still not really sure why as it appears to be worse in functionality as well as slower and more tied to a cloud backend.

In what ways is Lucidchart worse in functionality? (disclaimer: employee of Lucid Software)

I used to use Lucid a lot, since the early betas and for about 10 years.

Things I liked were that I could have a quick collaborative diagram with a friend for some bs project and not pay for it, and I could have a reasonable SAAS offering for a commercial team that wasn't expensive enough I got pushback. It was always a bit slow, and sometime quirky about connection placements but the diagrams were acceptable quality. Early on it was a lot less polished but you could make it work. And it was never a tool I'd use every day or realistically even every month, so it needed to be fairly low cost but I was happy to pay for when I did need it.

Now it is effectively impractical without a subscription so I can't use it for the former case. And the team offering are more enterprise-y and about double the price without adding any functionality I care about, so I tend not to do that either.

At some point I moved companies and didn't suggest a new team subscription, where previously I was usually the advocate for it. And the upsell messages and limitations of the free tier led me to find draw.io, which meets my needs for one-offs and little side projects as well as Lucid Chart ever did.

I'd say functionally they are mostly on par currently for my usages ... but that's the crux of your problem as a 10/month/head subscription.

Oh, and fwiw I use the offline version of draw.io most of the time, it's very responsive and also I like to work sometimes offline.

Re: Draw.io: Online Diagramming Website

#126

Post by franga2000 »

flanbiscuit wrote: post #29

> draw.io is a client-side, static web application. There is no user authenication or data storage concept in this repo. The online version stores data in mainstream cloud storage options, currently Google Drive, OneDrive, Dropbox, Github, Gitlab or Trello. I love this about Draw.io. This is how I want to build my applications. I don't want to deal with storing any user data and rather let them handle it how they see…

I love these kinds of apps, but I haven't seen any with support for self-hosted cloud storage (Nextcloud). Is there a technical limitation behind that, or is it just lack of interest?

Re: Draw.io: Online Diagramming Website

#127

Post by ska »

reaperducer wrote: post #112
gatherhunterer wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it seems so much harder for quick drafting than just using pen and paper I don’t consider that a reasonable criticism. Of course using pen and paper is quicker and easier. The advantage of any digital format is that it is distributable, universally readable and persistent.

It's also possible to have both. I have a "smart pen" that saves anything I write as a PDF on my phone that can be searched and stored where I choose (including cloud services). The downside is that you have to write on special paper or in special notebooks. But it's not as terrible as it sounds because the notebooks are very reasonably priced. It also works as an actual pen.

These are pretty useful as a note taking tool personally, and avoid scanning etc. I've never converted over but have had colleagues use them exclusively.

PDF's are a terminal format though, and doesn't really meet the need of a persistent, editable, graphic format for diagrams.

Re: Draw.io: Online Diagramming Website

#128

Post by ska »

nkrisc wrote: post #77
kelseyr wrote: post #41

I really like that you can export as PNGs and embed the diagram information inside. Being able send around PNGs that everyone can view, but can still be edited with draw.io makes sharing and updating much simpler.

This is really interesting, is this (or similar to) steganography? Poked around the repo but haven't yet found where this is implemented (on either end). From a user perspective that sounds like a super useful feature, though perhaps unexpected unless you were directly informed of it.

PNG allows for sidecar data, so you can just encode your "source" there.

Re: Draw.io: Online Diagramming Website

#129

Post by bityard »

franga2000 wrote: post #126
flanbiscuit wrote: post #29

> draw.io is a client-side, static web application. There is no user authenication or data storage concept in this repo. The online version stores data in mainstream cloud storage options, currently Google Drive, OneDrive, Dropbox, Github, Gitlab or Trello. I love this about Draw.io. This is how I want to build my applications. I don't want to deal with storing any user data and rather let them handle it how they see…

I love these kinds of apps, but I haven't seen any with support for self-hosted cloud storage (Nextcloud). Is there a technical limitation behind that, or is it just lack of interest?

Hrm? https://apps.nextcloud.com/apps/drawio

Re: Draw.io: Online Diagramming Website

#130

Post by chrisjc »

davidjgraph wrote: post #7
TheHypnotist wrote: post #6

I use Draw.io for work all the time. It's far less clunky than Vizio. My one minor issue is, due to security restrictions, I can't really save a whole lot outside of my local and it doesn't give me the option to choose my preferred directory.

Use desktop version https://github.com/jgraph/drawio-desktop/releases

Awesome! Just installed via brew

brew cask install drawio

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