Are there any alternatives to Microsoft Office Visio for Ubuntu?
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Try out just about anything. Like yEd for instance. DIA is unusable in comparison. I still wonder how I managed to document my Bachelor's Thesis using it. Try aligning objects in DIA, try creating any diagram so that it doesn't look like it was done in 3 minutes. It's a pain. Please, don't recommend DIA ; it hurts Linux as a platform. |
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I like LibreOffice Draw, its not as colorful as Visio, but works for me. |
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I believe a solution that has been completely overlooked for far too long is Visual Paradigm. It's closed source, but it has a free community edition (non-commercial use) and is very stable and polished. Also, the UML only commercial license is only $99. |
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As aldomann commented, install Dia |
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InkscapeI've primarily used Inkscape. It's a very different UI, but it works well and it's a powerful tool. Output can (depending on input) look as professional as necessary. In Inkscape, use the "Create diagram connector". It has the option to "Make connector avoid selected objects". If you draw a connector, then select the object you want to avoid, edit the connector and finally click the button to avoid that object, you can use smart connectors that will not overlap the different elements of your box. In practice, I find the easiest way to do this is to:
Also see this question and answers: Nice network diagram editor? About the other recommendationsI haven't used it much yet, but yEd looks very good. Alternatively, LibreOffice Draw is a popular piece of software, see other answers. One thing to note is that LibreOffice can now open Visio diagrams, and it lets you edit them. It works well for simple diagrams, not as well for very Visio-idiosyncrasy-intensive ones. It could still be usable with more effort, and in an environment with a lot of existing diagrams, this might be tolerable. |
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I also like yEd very much: it has a straightforward approach to creating diagrams and lets you work efficiently after a very short while. The quality of the diagrams can be very high: there are advanced alignment functions, custom Icons can be imported (also from Visio) and there are various output formats available. However, yEd requires an Oracle Sun Java VM, which is not standard e.g. in Ubuntu 11.10. A solution is given in http://yed.yworks.com/support/qa/17. The easiest solution for me was to download and extract the "Zipped yEd Jar" Download and call the Oracle Sun Java explicitely, like: |
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I tried Visual Paradigm and I must say that it works beautifully. I am currently going for my BS on EET and i find it really handy and reliable. |
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PENCIL ROCKS! And it's compatible with Windows and Macs too. Check out http://pencil.evolus.vn/ |
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Also, for online use - check out http://www.gliffy.com/ - it seems very powerful |
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In terms of online solutions, including those already mentioned in this thread, there's I'm not in a position to pass a judgement on relative merits, because I develop one of them. |
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I guess most web based solutions would match this answer. Of the web based solutions Creately offers a desktop solution that works on Linux. Although Flash haters might not like it. |
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I have used few, dont remember the names though. But you can try few browser based visio alternative . There are few out there obviously they are platform independent and based on flash or HTML 5. Some of them contains lots of tues and they are easy to use! |
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I would recommend Lucidchart as a robust alternative. As far as I know, it's the only Linux-compatible option that will import and export Visio documents and stencils. |
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