Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Draw.io: Online Diagramming Website

github.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 197 posts

Re: Draw.io: Online Diagramming Website

#131

Post by thayne »

tverbeure wrote: post #121
thayne wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

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

Yes, Lucidchart's performance has improved in the past couple years. And we now have resources dedicated to improving performance.

> From that perspective, these isn't much difference between any of these programs, so there's just no reason to use a paid product.

That's fair. I think Lucidchart's main advantage is more advanced functionality. And if you don't need that functionality, why pay for it?

Re: Draw.io: Online Diagramming Website

#132

Post by thayne »

abainbridge wrote: post #122
thayne wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That has worked in lucidchart for a while.

Re: Draw.io: Online Diagramming Website

#133

Post by breck »

hanniabu wrote: post #85
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…

> mainstream cloud storage options, currently Google Drive, OneDrive, Dropbox, Github, Gitlab or Trello. Anybody know of a library of service (preferably open source) that offers an easy API to interact with all these in such a way?

I would also love such a library. I currently follow the same pattern of making web apps that only use local storage so I don’t have access to user data, but would like to allow users to easily use their existing cloud services for persistence.

Re: Draw.io: Online Diagramming Website

#134

Post by davidjgraph »

thayne wrote: post #131
tverbeure wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

> This was a couple of years ago, so things may have changed since. Yes, Lucidchart's performance has improved in the past couple years. And we now have resources dedicated to improving performance. > From that perspective, these isn't much difference between any of these programs, so there's just no reason to use a paid product. That's fair. I think Lucidchart's main advantage is more advanced functionality. And if…

You're allowed to describe that advanced functionality, I'm pretty curious, myself.

Re: Draw.io: Online Diagramming Website

#135

Post by franga2000 »

bityard wrote: post #129
franga2000 wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Right, I forgot about that - I actually have it installed on my instance. But my point wasn't specifically about Draw.io, but other cloud-synced web apps like StackEdit. It seems none of them have Nextcloud as a first-class option (some have WebDAV, but that's still a lot more complicated than Dropbox etc.).

Re: Draw.io: Online Diagramming Website

#137

Post by blakeburch »

If you're looking for a fantastic diagramming site, I would recommend checking out [Whimsical](https://whimsical.com/). I've tried out a lot of solutions over the years (draw.io, LucidChart,Gliffy, etc.). Whimsical is the first that really nails the UI/UX. You spend less time fighting the system to make something that looks great and more time just building out your diagram.

I'm not associated with the product at all, but it definitely needs more love in the space.

Re: Draw.io: Online Diagramming Website

#139

Post by PragmaticPulp »

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)

> In what ways is Lucidchart worse in functionality?

draw.io is like the In-N-Out of charting software. The menu is short, but you know exactly what you're getting each time and the price is right. It may not be the best at everything, but I'm almost never disappointed.

Lucidchart feels like that neighborhood restaurant that has a six page menu that tries to be everything to everyone. It feels like they should have anything I desire, but they're spread so thin across so many options that they can never really perfect any of the individual entrees. I can usually find something in Lucidchart that looks like it would solve my problem, but it always feels half-finished. I waste hours each month learning to work around the quirks and limitations of the different components. I always leave slightly dissatisfied that Lucidchart almost did what I needed, but due to the limitations of the component I would have been better off just drawing a simple chart in draw.io or even in Sketch.

For example: The Lucidchart iPad app sounds like a dream come true. I would love to make charts on the go with a great iPad interface that properly utilizes the Apple Pencil. However, every time I use Lucidchart on iPad I spend all my time accidentally moving the page when I wanted to drag the corner of box, failing to select text for editing, switching between fingers and Pencil, and so on. I end up walking back to a computer to finish the chart. I want to believe the Lucidchart iPad app would be great, but I always spend so much time fighting it that I'd be better off sitting down with draw.io and making a basic chart in 10 minutes.

Re: Draw.io: Online Diagramming Website

#140

Post by fishtacos »

blakeburch wrote: post #137

If you're looking for a fantastic diagramming site, I would recommend checking out [Whimsical]( https://whimsical.com/ ). I've tried out a lot of solutions over the years (draw.io, LucidChart,Gliffy, etc.). Whimsical is the first that really nails the UI/UX. You spend less time fighting the system to make something that looks great and more time just building out your diagram. I'm not associated with the product at a…

Draw.io has the advantage of being open source and able to be self-hosted. I wouldn't trade that flexibility and security for anything.
Post reply on HN