If you want to create professional-quality flowcharts, diagrams, floor plans, technical drawings, etc. and you don’t want to install any applications on your computer you can use Gliffy – but it’s not the only one.
- griffy
There are many other options available out there (Lovely Charts, Cacoo). For instance, Dia is a wonderful multi-platform (GNU/Linux, Windows) application under the GPL license. It’s a Visio alternative and allows you to draw “entity relationship diagrams, UML diagrams, flowcharts, network diagrams, and many other diagrams”. Dia is perhaps the most comprehensive tool because it can be used in many areas and purposes.
If you are concerned about data modeling (entity relationship diagrams), you can try out MySQL Workbench and GNUFerret. I should warn you that Ferret is actually in the 0.7 version so in my humble opinion it’s not a final product yet.
If you are thinking about modeling with UML you may consider: Umbrelo UML, ArgoUML, BOUML and Gaphor. Other alternatives are Visual Paradigm for UML Community Edition, JUDE/Community – Free UML Modeling Tool, MonoUML and Kivio. You should pay a visit to an excellent blog called Blog Software Development with Linux which describes these tools in deep.
What do you think? Do you have another tool that you want to share with us? I’d really appreciate your comments.
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