Before you try Lucidchart: read this and save your time and money.

Microsoft Visio: the old diagramming tool by Microsoft. In its day, it was popular, but now, that’s different. If you search “Microsoft Visio” on Bing, it will turn up a bunch of results about Visio alternatives instead! Lucidchart often shows up first here, so many people will dish out their money here. That’s not that much cheaper than Visio!

 

Well, if Lucidchart isn’t right, then what are you saying?

 

Try clicking this link: draw.io. If you’ve been using Lucidchart, then it will allow the import of Lucidchart files. Okay, I’m getting ahead of myself. This is supposed to explain it to you, not send you somewhere else to read a different article! So, draw.io is a free Visio alternative that is completely open-source and has strong integration with Google Drive. It does not require any account, and its desktop version allows you to work offline. If you are offline, but you’re collaborating on a diagram stored in a cloud location, it allows you to manually synchronize the file. It supports Google Drive, Microsoft OneDrive, Dropbox, GitHub, GitLab, and local device storage. It feels very much as if it is one of Google’s own apps when you use it with Google Drive, with Google Drive version control, Google Drive sharing, and even a preview of the diagram in Google Drive! It is, however, not like Lucidchart or Visio in the sense that it uses a slightly different system.

That’s fine, but how do I even use draw.io?

You just go to diagrams.net and click start. It will launch a new tab with a blank diagram in it. It doesn’t make you use any account. You can save it to any of the storage supported. It can do most of the capabilities of Visio and Lucidchart for free! And as a bonus, it supports the import and export of

Visio, plus the import of Lucidchart and Gliffy. You can even embed it in other places. Here are a few examples:

It can be embedded as an image in any HTML webpage. It will even continually update to the Diagram file. Also supported are Google Docs, Google Sheets, Google Slides, and Microsoft Office. Give it a shot at diagrams.net!