

Ask HN: What are you using for system architecture diagraming? - dpeck

Time to start doing some system diagramming to explain my design to others on the team and get feedback.<p>Is Visio still the best option? Or has something else gotten your attention lately?
======
dwwoelfel
I'm building a generic collaborative prototyping tool that I think works well
for infrastructure diagrams, especially if you want something a bit more free-
form. I wrote up a short tutorial here:
[https://precursorapp.com/blog/diagramming-with-
precursor](https://precursorapp.com/blog/diagramming-with-precursor)

~~~
Yadi
Looks pretty neat!

Any plans to move it to mobile for touch surfaces?

------
nostrademons
Don't underestimate the effectiveness of 3x5 cards & string, or of
whiteboards. Particularly if you want to _change_ your design in addition to
just documenting it. It won't be persistent (unless you take a photo of it),
but you can really quickly iterate and find opportunities for simplification.

------
mattkrea
My personal favorite (on Mac) is Monodraw
([http://monodraw.helftone.com/](http://monodraw.helftone.com/))

~~~
blub
How does this compare to Omnigraffle? Too bad I didn't find it when looking
for such a tool.

~~~
mattkrea
Omnigraffle works fine but I prefer this solely because of the ASCII output

------
AdieuToLogic
ArgoUML[1] is pretty decent, though has few updates recently.

1 - [http://argouml.tigris.org](http://argouml.tigris.org)

~~~
benlaud
+1 for ArgoUML. After created the diagram, I usually just did a C&P to Google
Docs / Evernote as document. It is very convenience.

------
blub
Visio is terrible at UML. Fortunately there are 3rd party stencils available
which make it much better.

Whatever you do, go for a drawing tool (Visio, Omnigraffle) and not a UML tool
(Visual paradigm, Enterprise architect). The latter are too complicated and
expect that the diagram is correct from a UML standard perspective, which
unless you're generating code is useless and cumbersome to do.

------
kalagan
I used Dia ([http://dia-installer.de/](http://dia-installer.de/)) and
Lucidchart ([https://www.lucidchart.com](https://www.lucidchart.com)) in the
past. It's not ideal but it can do the job.

------
Yadi
Big white papers are the best! I love sketching it out a few times, and throw
some of them.

Until it reaches a diagram that I would actually like, then I will transform
it to this FREE googleDrive tool called (draw.io).

------
hbcondo714
I'm a long time user of Visio but lately I've been using online diagram tools
like Gliffy, especially for some UML.

