Cacoo is a user-friendly online diagramming tool that allows users to create a variety of diagrams such as wireframes, flowcharts, UML diagrams, network diagrams, mindmaps, sitemaps, database diagrams, and more.
Cacoo includes an extensive collection of templates and shapes, collaboration features such as simultaneous editing, version tracking, and commenting. Cacoo is simple, cloud-based software users can access from anywhere with an internet connection.
It's a great alternative to taking photos of whiteboards to save for later reference, you can just create them here. It's also the best option I've found for creating workflows and organization charts, especially complex ones. If you have just a simple workflow or chart, it's probably too robust or complicated for those needs. Save it for the trickier or messier ones!
As I said earlier in this review, OmniGraffle does an excellent job with arcs if they are created in OmniGraffle. The same is not true if the drawing I'm working on was imported from Visio. In that case, I need to just start all over with the arc lines, and that is not often a reasonable option.
The ability to easily map out process flows for users of a wide range of tech comfort levels—The design is intuitive enough for even people with lower tech comfort levels to visually chart process flows. We have never had to do significant onboarding for less tech-savvy colleagues—this is a huge timesaver!
Collaborative mind mapping—OmniGraffle is a great platform to get together with people and brainstorm ideas in the early stages of a project, then link ideas together to create visual relationships to inform business and product design decisions.
Communicating strategy to stakeholders—Communicating the complexities of a workflow to stakeholders is a lot easier and more effective, with a diagram that clearly shows the relationships between factors rather than showing them a PowerPoint that, because of its slide-by-slide nature, makes it difficult to consistently show how different factors play into an overall workflow.
No support for team collaboration. I would really like to see a way to share files to iCloud so that others can access and edit.
Better print settings. If you're trying to print a document across many pages, it's not easy to make this happen.
No ability to pre-configure settings. For example, I have to manually change the unit of measure from "inches" to "pixels" when I create a new document, would like the ability to change that fundamentally.
Cacoo is web-based and OS independent. OmniGraffle is a local install and mac only. Microsoft Visio is a desktop app also and Windows only. Two strikes for me, as I use between 2-4 different computers daily where I expect my applications to be always up-to-date and files synchronized.
Because we're primarily a Mac shop, Visio was a non-starter. (It's monstrously complex compared to OmniGraffle, which works against the quick-and-dirty just-enough-documentation ideal common on agile teams.) We've used draw.io on internal projects and when coordinating with external teams, but a web-based tool was too awkward for heavy use and bogged down with complex documents. For us, OmniGraffle sits in the "sweet spot" between complex data-driven modeling tools and lightweight "drawing" programs that force too much manual labor when doing heavy diagramming work.
I've created multiple OmniGraffle template files that I use constantly. I create covers for our proposals in OmniGraffle with pictures of the the client's buildings or sites. All I need to do is drag and drop the image into the template, change the title and client name and address accordingly and it's ready to go.
Using templates in OmniGraffle has saved lots of time.
Using OmniGraffle to design drawing details for construction documents has allowed us to land projects, purchase orders and new clients to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars.
