Tell HN: Use diagrams.net (formerly drawio) for most of your diagrams

11 points·hardwaresofton··4 comments

Diagrams.net delivers an insane amount of value for free:

- importable sets of diagram components (ex. AWS service icons)

- Ability to save the design, extract a PNG/SVG/PDF/etc

- Integrating with Google Drive/OneDrive/GitLab/GitHub for saving

- Support for Confluence, JIRA, etc.

It's pretty crazy how much value is in there.

I used drawio for a while but I have recently switched over to Excalidraw. No frills and has a plugin for Obsidian so I can switch between iPad w/ Apple Pencil, MacBook, etc. with active syncing. The lacking part of Excalidraw seems to be the lack of easily available sets of diagram components. Both products are pretty great.

Agreed -- Excalidraw is also awesome! Link for the lazy:

https://excalidraw.com

They do have reusable sets of diagrams now, they're called "libraries":

https://libraries.excalidraw.com

I love diagrams.net, it's what I use whenever I need to prototype a UI. And one thing I particularly love is you don't need to register to use it or to save your work.

Most online tools have a dark pattern where they pretend it's possible to use without registering, they even say so on their landing page, and then when you go to save your work they force you to register. Diagrams.net doesn't do that and they have my respect.

I've been using a system called PlantUML for a while that allows you to create diagrams using plaintext, there are plugins for VSCode and Word and support in Gitlab is available:

https://plantuml.com/

https://www.planttext.com/

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