GraphViz and yED are also good options. https://www.graphviz.org/ https://www.yworks.com/products/yed

Gephi is also quite popular https://gephi.org/

PlantUML, mentioned in TFA, uses the excellent GraphViz. http://plantuml.com/graphviz-dot

Hi, Big Big fan of yEd but how can you do text to diagram with it? Do you write the .graphml file by hand (never looked it up, might be easier than I think!). Any pointers?

Also, looking up the license some time ago it seemed the free license prevented you from doing automatic diagram generation with yEd?

Yeah, I'd say yEd fits into the same category the author noted at the very beginning: It's a graphical tool for creating graphs. yEd does support several file formats to import, some of which are text-based, e.g. TGF, but they're not terribly convenient to input directly.

And indeed, yEd is free, but intentionally lacks mechanisms (and the permission) of automating it. Those use cases are usually far better served by licensing the underlying graph drawing/analysis/layout library.

Draw.io is free and open source. Online, Mac, Windows, Linux.

Online: https://www.draw.io/

Desktop: https://github.com/jgraph/drawio-desktop/releases/

Example diagrams: https://about.draw.io/features/examples/

Source code: https://github.com/jgraph/drawio

Draw.io is great, but it's not the same as OP. It's a drawing tool rather than a text -> diagram tool.

See also ditaa: http://ditaa.sourceforge.net/

It's quite buggy though, and seemingly unmaintained. I'm hoping to spare a weekend or two sometime in the near future to write a replacement but we'll see..

I'm not a huge fan of most of the rest of the text-to-graph tools because they give me so little control over how things are laid out, and while there are ways to give layout hints, it feels like an uphill battle to get them to reproduce the information you have in your head / on paper.

One thing I’ve discovered about not having layout control is that the resulting graph complexity can help give you a hint about the correctness of your solution.

A couple of years ago I was helping to architect a new system and I decided to use yUML to start showing snippets of what I was thinking. Ultimately everyone starting adding every detail and the picture was unreadable. As we kept iterating we kept updating our yUML text and one time the graph came out beautiful. That actually ended up being really close to the solution we implemented.

yUML uses graphviz with the layout set for minimum line crossing. So when your graph looks good and is easy to layout without tons on lines crossing you can use that as a hint that you’re on the right track to a solution that you can keep in your head. And it’s always easier to engineer what you can keep in your head.

It’s been a good heuristic for me over the years.

I wish there was something that consumed a text description like Mermaid and outputted LibreOffice Draw files. Because I'll need to hand the file out to someone and it will possibly be maintained/modified in the future, but putting in all the boxes and lines by hand is driving me mad.

There's a sphinx extension (sphinxcontrib-sdedit) [1] for sdedit ("Quick Sequence Diagram Editor") which does require Java [2].

[1] https://pypi.org/project/sphinxcontrib-sdedit/

[2] http://sdedit.sourceforge.net/

Not much of a survey (the subtitle of the article)... Screenshots are included for some and not for others.

Thank you. Some really awesome tools their that I hadn't seen before.