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Visio Relative Resource |
You can't accuse Microsoft of nurturing Not Invented Here Syndrome (is a
pathological prejudice against ideas and software they didn't develop
themselves); some of Microsoft's best products have been other people's
creations, which they bought to add to their portfolio. Visio is one such
program, now assimilated into the MS Office "family". This is a
disappointment to long-time users who liked Visio as it was (a stand-alone
application that didn't care what other software you used) because now it's
changing to work only in conjunction with its new siblings. Fans of other
flowcharting programs have reason to be concerned because those products are
now in danger of being stomped by the strongest software marketing machine
on the planet.
OK, I admit it: I don't know much of anything about this category of
software beyond the one I used back in the day (Visio). And I don't do much
charting anymore, so I haven't done any evaluation of the alternatives. But
people keep asking me for this page, and I've gotten as far as finding out
what many of the alternatives are, so here's an admittedly-not-very-useful
list of links. I'll add actual facts and opinions as time permits; input
from those in the know is very welcome.
EDraw - Perfect vector-based diagramming software with abundant examples and templates and Visio like. The best way to visualize and understand your workforce. EDraw Organizational Chart is a new organization chart software, novel, small and exquisite, which is the simplest way to create professional-looking organizational charts with free organizational chart templates and examples - with no drawing required. Ideal for smaller businesses who want to chart up to 500 employees, EDraw helps you visualize your organization so you can make informed business decisions. It was designed specifically to help you create diagrams for human resources management, staff organization, office administration, and management structures.
Creativedocs.net - Creative Docs .NET is a vector-based graphic design tool with support for rich text, ideal to quickly write short documents, manuals, posters, illustrations, schemas, plans, flow charts, and much more. The interface is tailored for high productivity: it does never get in your way. Creative Docs .NET tools are simple, yet powerful. All styles and attributes can be modified interactively with a minimum number of mouse clicks. A color gradient, for instance, can be modified directly by dragging its handles in the document window.
SmartDraw - Create your own professional-quality graphics in minutes with SmartDraw. No experience or training required. More shapes than Visio.
ConceptDraw - ConceptDraw Product Line is set of powerful cross-platform tools for easy diagramming, flowcharting, mindmapping, project planning, creating presentations and visualisating your ideas. Like Visio 2000.
Inkscape - Inkscape is an Open Source vector graphics editor, with capabilities similar to Illustrator, Freehand, CorelDraw, or Xara X using the W3C standard Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) file format. Supported SVG features include shapes, paths, text, markers, clones, alpha blending, transforms, gradients, patterns, and grouping. Inkscape also supports Creative Commons meta-data, node editing, layers, complex path operations, bitmap tracing, text-on-path, flowed text, direct XML editing, and more. It imports formats such as JPEG, PNG, TIFF, and others and exports PNG as well as multiple vector-based formats.
OrgPlus - Organization Charts designed with OrgPlus dramatically help to understand your organizational structure. Web-based organizational charts allow for efficient human resource planning and aid in intelligence management. A good choice for Visio organizational chart replacement.
Org Charting - Organizational charts (Org Charts) are an extremely effective way to communicate organizational, employee and enterprise information. An org chart makes it easier for people to understand large amounts of information as a visual picture rather than as a table of names and numbers.
Free Mind - FreeMind is a premier free mind-mapping (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mind_map) software written in Java. The recent development has hopefully turned it into high productivity tool. We are proud that the operation and navigation of FreeMind is faster than that of MindManager because of one-click "fold / unfold" and "follow link" operations. Visio replacement for mind map.
Visual Paradigm - Visual Paradigm, with products Visual Paradigm for UML (VP-UML), Smart Development Environment (SDE) and DB Visual Architect (DB-VA), is a world-recognized company in UML modeling and CASE tool technologies. VP-UML is a UML modeling tool that supports UML 2.1 with the most intuitive and innovative visual modeling user interface. SDE is a division of VP-UML that is fully-integrated into leading IDEs, including Eclipse and Visual Studio, to provide sophisticated code model synchronization capabilities. DB-VA is a single, easy-to-use object-relational mapping (ORM) environment which acts as a bridge between object model, data model and relational model.
CuteDraw Professsional - Perfect Flowchart and Org Chart Diagramming software with rich templates and examples. It is a vector-based graphic design software, quickly create illustrations, documents, manuals, schemas, plans, flow charts, org charts, network diagrams, UML etc.
UML's Sequence Diagram - offers a detailed introduction to the sequence diagram. It also introduces several new notation elements in the recent UML 2.0 specification.
Network Diagrammer - Network Diagram Software - Perfect network design software for network drawings with abundant examples and templates. EDraw is ideal for network engineers to create perfect network diagrams in minutes. Free Download!