[account-5]

I really like draw.io, I've used it for a number of things including wireframing an app and creating cheatsheets for things.

It's definitely not as frictionless as excalidraw though. Excalidraw, whilst not as powerful as draw.io has the interface down correctly.

[noahjk]

What do people use for creating artifacts at their jobs?

Architecture diagrams, data flow diagrams, sequence diagrams, network diagrams, entity-relationship diagrams ...

I'd really like to find an option which can preferably be version controlled and doesn't require hard-to-remember schema (ex. plantUML).

At work it's always tough to find something which works, and which is free or already licensed (no chance to get new licenses), and which is easy enough for teammates of varying technical abilities to contribute to.

For Arch Diagrams, most people seem to jump to Draw.IO, which is nice, but I'm not sure how easily it can be version controlled (although I haven't tried). At work it usually falls into the "did you put your latest version on SharePoint" black-hole (we don't pay for the cloud syncing version of draw.io). I wanted to try Figma, since it's at least a bit more collaborative, but there aren't any good first-party templates, so maybe it's not the right place, either.

For DFDs, I'd like to try Mermaid, or D2, or PlantUML (scared by the syntax on that one, though). I've not tried any of these, right now we usually do these in draw.io too, but I feel like code-defined ones would be an easier to maintain option and can live in a repo easier.

Sequence Diagrams are currently usually done using the sequencediagram.org engine, which I'm not a huge fan of, but at least it's relatively easily handled text. I don't think there was a good VS Code integration last time I checked (I think it was some web emulator, not a built-in engine?).

ERDs, I'd also like to find a good local tool to probably just use SQL on the backend, so that it's one less conversion. I'm open to all suggestions for that, though.

[xtracto]

I've been doing diagrams with Mermaid. The beauty is that I use Gemini to ask it to add stuff to the diagram. And there are a bunch of plug-ins for Google docs to visualize the diagrams. I just wish Confluence had a free way to do it.

[jimmySixDOF]

tldraw is also something very easy to use but surprisingly powerful and I know they are compared a lot to Excalidraw, not so sure about draw.io - but could be worth adding to your list. It is a very extendable library with some fun genai hooks like makereal.tldraw