Workflow Diagramming Software

[Kate X257]

I have used all the flowcharting tools, all of them, and they all fall flat when sharing or presenting the final flowchart. In the end, you either end up buying 50+ accounts for an overpriced web-service, or you're printing large and unwieldy A3 pages to scribble on and then remake like a crazy person.. or nobody ever looks at the damn things and they collect dust as they slowly get outdated and superfluous. Looking at you Visio. That being said, the only flowcharting I ever enjoyed using was Text::Flowchart - ASCII Flowchart maker[^] It's ASCII, it's for Perl, and it doesn't take a million years to update when something changes. Easy to fit in a Word document, easy to "improve" by dragging pictures on top. If you need something fancy looking for 1 presentation, use PowerPoint directly and save yourself a lot of work.

[Cpichols]

No answer, but thanks for the ask because I'm always on the hunt for tools to help me plan and explain processes I'm considering.

[User 13076082]

RFFlow is the best flow charting software I have ever used, and I have used many of them. I've been creating flow charts for 30 years. It is not very popular, but you should try if you've never tried it. RFFlow is not hard to use and you can do almost anything you can do with Visio, Lucid Chart, etc. RFFlow comes with a ton of built in stencils and you can create your own stencils also. RFFlow's cost is around 50 dollars, so it is also economical. RFFlow Flowchart Software[^]

[Matt Bond]

I've used Draw.IO for my classwork and highly recommend it. You can save your project files locally too.

Bond Keep all things as simple as possible, but no simpler. -said someone, somewhere

[thewazz]

Now called diagrams.net. Downloadable?

[Kirk 10389821]

We use Balsamiq which creates a PDF with "active links" if you take the time to do them. You can use it to do Rough GUI, or just boxes and lines (of a flowchart). I really appreciate that the output can be saved as a PDF. We use it mostly for mockups. It's really simple to learn. About 35 years ago, in DOS we used a program called EZFlow... It was keyboard driven, and arrow keys drew your arrows between boxes. Every box was a single letter (D for Diagonal Decision). That I still remember it Blows my mind. We cranked out the diagrams for documentation.

[Joan M]

Sure: Blog - Use diagrams.net desktop to diagram offline[^]

www.robotecnik.com[^] - robots, CNC and PLC programming

[Grot Soft]

Big plus for PlantUML. Once you get used to drawing diagrams by "coding" them, you never want to go back to having to shuffle shapes about. Plus you can write parsers for the PUML diagrams and do fancy things with them. I've got an experimental state model to code system as a play project, with an ANTLR parser for the PUML diagram.

[obeobe]

Why draw your diagrams when you can code them? Use PlantUML - New Activity Diagram[^]. It's not the fanciest of websites, but it works well, and integrates with an impressive number of tools: Running PlantUML from Other Tools[^]

[jkirkerx]

I use Figma. Pretty useful for me. I can diagram and then share the diagrams with the customer and contractors [https://www.figma.com/\](https://www.figma.com/)

If it ain't broke don't fix it Discover my world at jkirkerx.com