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I'm a Sales/Solutions/Systems Engineer/Consultant/Architect, but I also code still. I create loads of diagrams for work. For Enterprise-Grade Slideware™, I'll use either Lucidchart or draw.io. For my personal projects, I'll use Mermaid.
I'm clearly biased since I work at Datadog[1], but I use and recommend Cloudcraft[2] for diagramming. As I don't use the cloud I focus more on the manual design tools, but the automatic stuff are pretty neat. Recently, though, I've been using D2[3] a lot and really liking it. The diagrams don't look as aesthetically pleasing to my eyes, but being able to design everything with a simple language is pretty cool, and he…
I'm clearly biased since I work at Datadog[1], but I use and recommend Cloudcraft[2] for diagramming. As I don't use the cloud I focus more on the manual design tools, but the automatic stuff are pretty neat. Recently, though, I've been using D2[3] a lot and really liking it. The diagrams don't look as aesthetically pleasing to my eyes, but being able to design everything with a simple language is pretty cool, and he…
Does Cloudcraft do generic diagramming? At least from the landing page it seems pretty purpose-built for cloud architecture diagramming only. I also have to give major kudos for whoever made the call to go with an isometric projection... visually and mentally, it's a perfect choice for that domain!
In a pinch and when on a call, it’s always Microsoft paint.
Mermaid - support in many markdown rendering pages. Embedding a ``` block in Markdown and having it versioned as text is the big win. Graphviz - same basic reason as Mermaid, though no markdown support. Versioning text is a lot easier than versioning binaries. Draw.io - if you've got to have a binary, this is it. In particular, it allows you to embed the drawing information in the image so that you can import a .png…
And if I need to generate a graph programmaticaly then I instinctively reach for Graphviz as it's solid and can produce the graphs in so many different file formats that they're easy to include wherever they're needed. Your code is a lot simpler as it doesn't need to handle any of the rendering logic, it just needs to work out which nodes are connected by which edges.
Mermaid - support in many markdown rendering pages. Embedding a ``` block in Markdown and having it versioned as text is the big win. Graphviz - same basic reason as Mermaid, though no markdown support. Versioning text is a lot easier than versioning binaries. Draw.io - if you've got to have a binary, this is it. In particular, it allows you to embed the drawing information in the image so that you can import a .png…
Regarding graphviz/dot, I have been using it from what feels like the dawn of time and am somewhat sad that we haven’t improved upon it. The syntax, styling imitations, etc. put me off enough that I tend to avoid it.
There are a few good options in the code to SVG (PNG, JPG, whatever) space besides Mermaid. The venerable graphviz has been around since the 90s, I think, and uses the DOT language. The newer D2 language probably has the nicest overall aesthetics as well: https://play.d2lang.com/
For work especially if it's for a large audience I use Visio or GraphViz. For my own consumption (and a couple co-workers) I really prefer mermaidjs, especially just to have it embedded in markdown files.
For your large audience cases - do those typically go in one-off presentations or are they for more long-lived things (design docs, customer-facing docs, etc)?
Semi, aside, but I'm desperate for a better way to make math diagrams (WYSIWYG style, not TeX). I asked about this a while ago and nothing is really doing it for me: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38351370 . Although since then I have heard about https://penrose.cs.cmu.edu/ as well. Right now I use Excalidraw because there's a fork (never landed... ugh) which supports TeX in labels. But its actual drawing tools…