Drawing and Diagraming Tools for Mac

Drawing & Diagraming Tools for Mac

draw.io

This is the tool I have started using recently. I was looking for a free web based solution and this one works good for me as of now. Will provide detailed review later. Google+

Inkscape

Inkscape is a free-hand drawing tool and it can create SVG images. See here, the full feature of Inkscape.
When installing Inkscape, you want to make sure XQuartz will also needs to be installed. Please read the installation process carefully.

Paint 2

I got this tool from Apple App Store for about $5. I needed something urgently for my wife to work on some wireframe and diagraming. After a quick evaluation for about 30 min, I bought this tool. Till now, it has been doing its job. This is not being used for tones of paint functionality, but limited to editing the wireframes, screenshots, etc what was being done through MSPaint in windows. $5 not a big deal, even if we have to trash it tomorrow.

Modeling Tool

Archi

Archi is the ArchiMate Modeling tool. ArchiMate is Enterprise Architecture Modeling Standard provided by The Open Group. I have used this tool pretty heavily during few of my project. Work with great charm for a small size team or small project. I used this tool as part of evaluation to find whether ArchiMate Standard can become part of our internal Architecture work or not. I couldn't find much limitation in the tool itself, but seemed like our organization was not well prepared for the ArchiMate ride. It was a good experience to know the amount of effort required in capturing the details of Enterprise Architecture using ArchiMate. Bottomline, the diagrams I created were not readable by almost none, because everyone had to be trained and mentally prepared to accept ArchiMate as the standard for Architecture Modeling.

Here are the drawback or limitation, if I will:

1. You can not build a collaboration environment on this tool where many people are working on the same model.
2. Desktop Installation base, that means, you would have to create a shared environment, where everyone has to synch EOD. There are huge potential of code conflict.
3. Not maintainable for large portfolio of Application or for large Enterprise Architecture work.

Considering it is a free tool and provides almost all the basic ArchiMate functionality, this is a great tool to start with.

StarUML

StartUML seems very professional and the free version doesn't have any limitation of time or feature. I used this for creating few sequence diagrams and other system level diagrams. I works great for me. I would recommend buying this if you are going to use on a regular basis. It cost around $70 for personal and $90 for commercial license.