Jill Duffy The Best Flowchart and Diagramming Apps of 2017 Create the professional-looking flowcharts, org charts, floor plans, and other diagrams your business needs with these easy-to-use applications. Flowcharts and Diagrams Made Easy Business professionals, educators, and students often need to make visuals to go along with other materials they present. An organizational chart may help an executive explain to investors the company's structure. An educator might need a flowchart to explain a complex process to students. A medical student might create an annotated figure of the human body for a peer-reviewed paper. Few people who need to create these visuals just happen to also be experts in online drawing and design. These easy-to-use are precisely what such users need.

• Best Flowchart Software For Mac

Diagramming apps help people who have no artistic talent produce professional-looking organizational charts, floor plans, evacuation maps, Venn diagrams, flowcharts, and other visuals. They're typically pretty easy to learn to use, especially if you're familiar with other office software.

Diagramming software was invented after vector software failed to help people who were not artistically inclined. Vector software gives you tools for drawing lines, making boxes and circles, and adding text. If you're an artist or a designer, you can use those virtual pen-and-paper products to make whatever you need. If you're not an artist, however, vector software is completely frustrating to use. You might as well be thrown back into the seventh grade with nothing more than construction paper and a protractor to make visuals for a multimillion-dollar company. Templates.All good diagramming software comes with templates.

Templates are sample versions of the visuals you are likely going to create. Unlike old-school vector software, modern diagramming apps are built with the kinds of diagrams people are likely to make in mind. They therefore provide templates for all the common purposes for diagrams. That's why I mentioned org charts, flowcharts, and floor plans early in this article. Those are some of the most common diagram types people create, and I haven't found a diagramming app that doesn't offer several templates in all those categories. Templates start you out with a layout for your visual. Objects are the pieces of content on the template.

Many templates come with objects already in place, but there are more objects, usually in a pane to the left, that you can add to your masterpiece. Diagramming software also lets you add custom objects when you upload images. If your company or educational program has specific visuals that need to be incorporated into a diagram, you don't have to draw them by hand to add them. You can instead simply upload image files. Maybe with the right tools, you can make the perfect visuals.

Or maybe you need some help from a coworker who fills in details, or from an art director who finesses your work into something even more appealing. Diagramming apps that support collaboration allow more than one person to edit a graphic simultaneously.

Best Flowchart Software For Mac

In the best apps, the collaboration is live and in real time, much the way and other apps in the support it. Being able to collaborate effortlessly also means that when you pass a diagram on to a manager or boss for approval, that person can make a few lights edits firsthand rather than telling you what the changes should be. That saves everyone a lot of time and reduces frustration. How Much Does it Cost? The cheapest diagramming apps are free to use, and the most expensive ones cost around $300 for a desktop version of the software. Subscription fees are much more common than straight purchases, however, with the best apps charging between $100 and $200 per year.

My favorite apps are those that offer a free level of service so that you can try them out without a time limitation. They usually add more features and services if you upgrade to a paid tier of service (in other words, they're freemium apps). Be careful with free services, though.

Sometimes when you create diagrams with them, your files are publicly viewable. You wouldn't want to create a company networking diagram, for example, that might contain sensitive information that anyone could find.

Top Software for Flowcharts and Diagrams After I tested and compared several of the most popular apps for creating diagrams, two stood out for their exemplary ease of use, feature set, template and object library, and value. They are Lucidchart and SmartDraw. These two earn PCMag's Editors' Choice. My top choice among these two winners is Lucidchart. Lucidchart is an online diagramming app with excellent support for collaboration, and it's easy to pick up and use.

Because it's online, there's no need to worry about whether all the collaborators are running macOS or Windows. Lucidchart simply runs in the browser. SmartDraw is the runner-up, and I like the web app version SmartDraw Cloud for the same reason I like Lucidchart. Why worry about platform compatibility when everyone can simply work on the web? SmartDraw's template library is even bigger than Lucidchart's, but the app costs a bit more and doesn't have the same excellent real-time co-authoring features.

The Best Free Software for Flowcharts and Diagrams. When it comes to free diagramming apps, Draw.io is my go-to.

Draw.io works very well if you're in the position of needing to make a visual or two every so often, and paying $100 a year for the privilege seems bonkers. Draw.io lets you save your files to Google Drive, Dropbox, and OneDrive. You can also save files you create with it to your computer. Even though it's a web app, there's an offline option and Chrome users can access it by installing the Draw.io Desktop Chrome app.

If you're feeling suspicious about why Draw.io is entirely free, here's the deal. The company makes one version of the product that it sells for a fee: Draw.io for Confluence Server.

That version of Draw.io is a plug-in for Confluence Server, and it lives entirely behind the firewall. It lets teams create diagrams within those spaces to have visual aids and representations of the work done there.

If you get hooked on the free version of Draw.io and you're in the market for a tool that specifically works with Confluence Server, maybe you'll bite and pay for the service. Explore Your Templates! One of my favorite things about diagramming apps is exploring the templates. You might just find a diagram you didn't even know you needed, such as a business decision-making diagram for responding to emergencies. Need to post a First Aid chart in your office break room? Does your kid's soccer team have a phone tree?

Browse the templates in a diagramming app, and you're sure to uncover something unexpected and hopefully useful, which will surely help you appreciate the value of having it in the first place. For more tips on how to get important documents made in hurry, you can read.

Excellent real-time collaboration support included when connected to a Google account. Cons: Collection of templates and shapes is unimpressive. Not as easy for non-designers to use as other diagramming apps. Importing from other file types was unsuccessful in testing.

Bottom Line: Draw.io is a useful, free diagramming service with strong collaboration features via Google. It's handy if you only occasionally need to make diagrams, but for better functionality and more templates you'll want a premium service.

Read on for our detailed analysis of each app There was a time, before computers, when every child in senior school carried with them a plastic stencil for creating neat flowcharts. Thankfully, creating them on a computer is so much easier to do, faster to change, and infinitely reproducible. Clear diagrams can detail the flow of information, products on a production line, the execution of code in software, and a dozen other business-critical processes. Managing people and resources can be difficult without understanding the dependencies involved, and these documents can often reveal those succinctly. Here are 10 of the best we could find, each with their own twist on the perfect recipe for being well understood. We've also highlighted the.

Limited template selection Business users often don’t work in isolation, and by Nulab is a charting solution built to address that need, among others. It’s an online tool that interfaces to a wide range of cloud services, including Google Drive/Docs, Confluence, Adobe Creative Cloud, Box and Dropbox. In addition to Cloud stored and distributed content, Cacoo also works with TypeTalk (another Nulab product) and Slack to enable an information flow that alerts other team members when a diagram is updated. The number of templates might be less than other products, but it has all the critical ones like Network diagrams, organisational charts and floor plans. The feature set makes it of the most use to systems designers, software engineers, project managers and business administrators. Pricing is competitive, with a single user license costing just $4.95 (£3.70) per month, and a three-user Team plan is $18 (£13.45) per month.

For those wanting greater control over their mission-critical tools, Cacoo offers an enterprise option where the system is installed on a private server, for ten or more users. There are also educational plans for teachers and students. For those wishing to check out Cacoo, trials are available for 14 days, and there is a free plan that allows six diagrams to be created in it, with limited sharing options. Expensive is a complete suite of applications designed to enable business planning and enhance productivity. Now at release 11, ConceptDraw Pro is just one of these tools and sits alongside ConceptDraw Office 4, Mindmap 9, Project 8 and ConceptDraw Store. Pro version 11 is a highly versatile business graphics and diagramming product with thousands of stencils and hundreds of templates ready to use.

But for those that want greater flexibility, it is possible to design any stencil elements from scratch and incorporate them into a design. These custom elements can then use the tree and chain connecting modes available in the ConceptDraw Pro 11 software. Fully compatible with Visio (stencils and drawings), Pro 11 can be installed either to the Microsoft Windows or Apple Mac platforms, each costing $199 (£149) for a single license. Five and ten user license packs are available with a user discount, and you can also buy Pro 11 in concert with Mindmap 9 and Project 8 for greater savings. For teachers and students it can be had for a very reasonable $99 (£74), and a free trial is available for those wishing to try it out. Online version uses Flash Where other tools rely on application installations, is available online, as a desktop app and also on mobile platforms.

It’s not exclusively for Flowcharts either, as it can be used to produce a wide variety of diagrams including organisational charts and wireframes, Gantt charts, Infographics and even maps. The available templates are extensive, and you can try it out online before you invest. One snag, and for many organisations it could be a deal breaker, is that online Creately uses Adobe Flash, and insists on it being on the client platform. Online Creately costs just $5 (£3.74) per month or $49 (£37) per year for a single user, and cheaper-per-head team pricing is also available. The Creately Desktop is $75 (£56) with one year of updates included. For the general public, Creately allows five diagrams to be created at zero cost, perfect for that small charting job that you can’t easily bend another tool to make. Only online Let’s say it upfront: is free.

No, seriously. They develop and maintain it at no cost to the user.

When you’ve recovered from that shock, you should know that it’s an online solution that can save your work to Google Drive or Microsoft OneDrive. It can handle a wide range of schematics, including complex BPMN workflows, UML diagrams and general Flowcharts, along with mind maps and network infrastructures. The list of possibilities is so big that we chose not to list them all here. So what is the catch?

Well, if you use either Confluence or JIRA Cloud, then they’d like a subscription paid for that functionality. But it’s hardly expensive, being 1$ (£0.75) for Confluence per user and $0.50 (£0.37) for JIRA, and pricing for 200 users is $20 (£14.94) and $10 (£7.47) respectively per month. Before you spend money on other solutions, it’s worth checking out Draw.io, if only to be amazed at what software tools you can get for free, and how good they can be. No groupware functionality Based in Arizona, Pacestar Software has four diagram design tools of which is the most versatile. Using Edge Diagrammer, you can easily generate block diagrams, flowcharts, org charts, family trees, data flow diagrams and many other standard diagrammatic forms. In addition to the base functionality, Pacestar has some free extension packs that support an even wider range of different diagramming methodologies.

The limitations of this product are that it is exclusively Windows platform, although it has very minimal hardware requirements and will run on any full version of Windows from XP upwards. There is also a free to distribute Windows tool that allows anyone to view drawings created using Edge Diagrammer. While this software is undoubtedly powerful and effective, it doesn’t take account of information flow or distribution within a large operation. Therefore if you intend to use this you’ll need to manage the files it creates with other tools. A single user license is $149 (£111), and the more seats you purchase, the cheaper it gets per user.

For those wanting to try it out a thirty-day trial is available to download, and for that period you can experience full functionality. No groupware connections Another cross-platform option, works on Windows, Mac and Linux natively. Created by the Shenzen Edraw software company, Edraw Max was built to construct professional-looking flowcharts, organisational diagrams and has templates for 280 different diagram types. If you have a specific need, you might not need all the power of Edraw Max, and the same company makes tailored tools for Mind Mapping, Infographics, Org Charts and nine other different specific diagram requirements. In theory, Edraw Max can do any of these jobs, although users might find the scope and power of this tool a little daunting at first. Those that get through an initially challenging learning curve report that once mastered this is a great application for creating professional looking schematics rapidly and efficiently. A single user license is $179 (£134) and includes free upgrades for three years on Windows and Mac.

Pay a little more and you can get a lifetime license with indefinite upgrades, or you can pay $99 (£74) per year for a subscription. Multi-user discounts are also available, as they are for educational users. Limited object customisation This product has many parallels with Draw.io, in that it also supports Confluence and JIRA Cloud, but is also working on a proprietary Cloud solution to be launched soon, called Gliffy Project. Gliffy Diagram is available now and provides a straightforward tool for creating a very wide variety of chart types online or within Confluence. It also stores created charts into Google Drive, should you use that those Cloud services. Pricing is $7.99 (£5.97) per month for a single user, but this unit cost reduces to $4.99 (£3.73) per user for team members.

Multi-user licenses also include additional groupware functionality. For Enterprise customers pricing is less per-person structured, and Gliffy provides an integrated solution that can dovetail into existing business processes. One nice twist on this online software tool is that you can install a Chrome version that can work offline, should an Internet connection not be available. What this product lacks is much in the way of object customisation, although it scores highly on ease of use and a gentle learning curve. Inexpensive per seat According to Lucid Software, they have over 11 million users.

Strongly suggesting that this is not a niche solution, but a highly popular one. Lucid is one of the few tools that covers Microsoft Windows, Apple Mac OSX and various Linux distributions by default, admittedly by being an online app rather than natively. For those who need workflow integration, supports Confluence, JIRA and JIVE, along with the Google Cloud and apps and Microsoft Visio compatibility.

There is a free trial that isn’t time limited. Instead, diagrams are restricted to a maximum of 60 objects, sufficient to explore its potential. Licensing starts at $5.45 (£4.07) per month for a Home user, and ‘Pro’ Business users pay $10 (£7.47) per month, both paid on annual subscriptions. Pro users get the ability to import and export to Visio, and dynamically link data into their charts for the extra money.

There are also Team versions with groupware and Enterprise options, all at extra cost. Lucid convinced Amazon, Adobe, DocuSign, Cisco, Red Hat and Wells Fargo to be customers. And, it might be right for your business, too. Lacks inherent groupware features When most people think about flow charts, they almost immediately think of, although the product is capable of creating all manner of diagrams quickly and efficiently. It was one of the first products with smart drawing tools, and today it retains the ability for the tool to intelligently restructure a drawing as the user moves objects around. The obvious big selling point of Visio is that its part of the suite, and therefore designed to integrate with the other Office tools seamlessly.

Microsoft offers four different options with Visio; two online, and another two that are standalone Windows applications. Visio Standard 2016 and Professional 2016 are the installable apps, and they retail for £279.99 ($375) and £529.99 ($709) respectively. As you might guess, that high pricing is intended to encourage you to subscribe to the online versions, labelled Visio Plan 1 and Visio Plan 2.

Plan 1 is pitched at £3.80 ($5) per user/month and is purely an online version, where Plan 2 costs £11.30 ($15) per user/month. And with that you also get online and Visio 2016 Professional app, and access to better mobile tools, and a Visio Viewer for iOS. These prices are if you subscribe annually, with month-by-month pricing being a little higher. For those already using Office 365, many of the existing packages include the online version of Visio. And, you can try that for free on Microsoft’s Office online website. Expensive per seat Like Lucid, can name an impressive list of blue-chip companies that are license holders since the company started in 1994.

These include at least half of the Fortune 500 quoted businesses and more than 250,000 public and private enterprises across the globe. The SmartDraw product can be used online or as a standalone Windows application.

It supports the creation of no less than seventy chart types, including all the standard ones. There more exotic templates include those for documenting a crime scene, landscape gardening, seating plan and even accident reconstruction. For those working as part of a team, it supports Confluence, JIRA, Trello and Google’s GSuiite. And, it’s fully compatible with Visio, able to import and export diagrams and stencils with Microsoft’s application. The Windows Desktop offers a single user license for $297 (£222) and multi-user 5+ licenses from $595 (£445). The online version is just $9.95 (£7.43) per month for one user, and $5.95 (£4.45) per user/month for 5+, both billed annually.

The multi-user packages have extra functionality that allows licenses to be managed and can also control the sharing of SmartDraw data with other users. Most of the sophistication of SmartDraw is in the templates and not the application. Therefore it might be more suitable for those who make many simple charts, and not those involved in the creation of very complex diagrams. What to look for when choosing flowchart software Although designers might use these tools, the majority of people creating flowcharts aren’t classically trained graphic designers. Therefore, they need a tool that assumes no artistic abilities but can generate professional looking results rapidly. There is a fine balance between an application giving the operator the power to do whatever they want and funnelling their efforts in the direction of ultimate success.

The way that most software handles this delicate balance is to offer the user templates that avoid them using too many fonts, or trying to cram too many elements into a design. If the operator has graphical skills, these restrictions might seem a hindrance, but to the less confident, they can be exactly the structural support these folks need. These are the key aspects that you might want to consider before purchasing a flowchart solution:. Templates: How many does the application have, and are any of them tailored to your specific needs (coding, game logic, command structures, etc)?. Objects: Almost all software will have a selection of predefined objects, and the number and quality of these should be assessed. If the graphical elements that you specifically need aren’t in the library, the ability to define your own will be very important.

Groupware: As important as the creation of a diagram might be, getting it distributed and centrally updated is also critical. Some applications can enable multiple people to work on the same design, which might be useful when documenting an especially complicated process.

Trial: Some of these tools can be expensive or require ongoing licensing, so it is useful to test a trial version before investing company cash.