For those without MS Visio or other paid alternatives, Draw.io can pretty much get you covered at zero cost, with the option of doing it client-side, online, etc. Not sure if the founders have the option, but I would encourage folks to donate a couple of bucks to encourage high quality free software such as this.
I’ve found the draw.io experience to be so far above Visio that I just can’t imagine going back. I put it up there with VLC and Handbrake as quality apps.
Even as a common dirty pirate; I donated to all of those.
I'm a fan as well. My org ended up dropping our draw.io intergration in Confluence in favour of Lucidchart; I'm still not really sure why as it appears to be worse in functionality as well as slower and more tied to a cloud backend.
> In what ways is Lucidchart worse in functionality?
draw.io is like the In-N-Out of charting software. The menu is short, but you know exactly what you're getting each time and the price is right. It may not be the best at everything, but I'm almost never disappointed.
Lucidchart feels like that neighborhood restaurant that has a six page menu that tries to be everything to everyone. It feels like they should have anything I desire, but they're spread so thin across so many options that they can never really perfect any of the individual entrees. I can usually find something in Lucidchart that looks like it would solve my problem, but it always feels half-finished. I waste hours each month learning to work around the quirks and limitations of the different components. I always leave slightly dissatisfied that Lucidchart almost did what I needed, but due to the limitations of the component I would have been better off just drawing a simple chart in draw.io or even in Sketch.
For example: The Lucidchart iPad app sounds like a dream come true. I would love to make charts on the go with a great iPad interface that properly utilizes the Apple Pencil. However, every time I use Lucidchart on iPad I spend all my time accidentally moving the page when I wanted to drag the corner of box, failing to select text for editing, switching between fingers and Pencil, and so on. I end up walking back to a computer to finish the chart. I want to believe the Lucidchart iPad app would be great, but I always spend so much time fighting it that I'd be better off sitting down with draw.io and making a basic chart in 10 minutes.
At some point, I actually paid for LucidChart for a year.
Last time I used it, before switching to draw.io, it became slow to the point of being unusable once you had a few pages in a document. And I was making an animation where each page showed the next step in a process, so there were a lot of pages.
This was a couple of years ago, so things may have changed since.
My diagrams may have a bunch of elements on them, but I don't think I use any advanced features (irrespective of whether it's Visio, LucidChart or draw.io). From that perspective, these isn't much difference between any of these programs, so there's just no reason to use a paid product.
Lucidchart is tiring complete :) we have a lot of data and automation features, integrations, text based diagramming, advanced shape libraries, dynamic shaped etc. Discoveravility of all the features can be lacking though because there is so much stuff. I've worked on the product for years and I still learn about new features all the time.
I used to use Lucid a lot, since the early betas and for about 10 years.
Things I liked were that I could have a quick collaborative diagram with a friend for some bs project and not pay for it, and I could have a reasonable SAAS offering for a commercial team that wasn't expensive enough I got pushback. It was always a bit slow, and sometime quirky about connection placements but the diagrams were acceptable quality. Early on it was a lot less polished but you could make it work. And it was never a tool I'd use every day or realistically even every month, so it needed to be fairly low cost but I was happy to pay for when I did need it.
Now it is effectively impractical without a subscription so I can't use it for the former case. And the team offering are more enterprise-y and about double the price without adding any functionality I care about, so I tend not to do that either.
At some point I moved companies and didn't suggest a new team subscription, where previously I was usually the advocate for it. And the upsell messages and limitations of the free tier led me to find draw.io, which meets my needs for one-offs and little side projects as well as Lucid Chart ever did.
I'd say functionally they are mostly on par currently for my usages ... but that's the crux of your problem as a 10/month/head subscription.
Oh, and fwiw I use the offline version of draw.io most of the time, it's very responsive and also I like to work sometimes offline.
I wasn't trying to claim that middle mouse canvas movement didn't work in Lucidchart. The mechanism is just different, and IMO worse, than the one in draw.io. I think if you ask ten users to try both, you'll find a clear preference for the draw.io mechanism. I think it is important because it is an exceedingly commonly used feature.
This is one of the reasons why you will often see software installation look linear [10min until it is finalized, 8min until is finalized...] even though on a micro-scale, the process may be oscillating a lot more.
I highly doubt most programs know when they'll finish, usually there's multiple stages of say installation, copying files, editing the registry, generating some other files, downloading updates, etc. Some of those stages take milliseconds, others can take minutes or longer. Maybe some take seconds on an NVME SSD but takes 4 minutes on an HDD (verifying files commonly has this behaviour), etc.
If the progress bar doesn't differentiate which stage it's in then it's purpose is mostly just to let the user know it's doing something.
I had an Epson scanner that had a progress bar while scanning. You could HEAR the scanner progress, and it wasn't close to even - sometimes it would stop for a while, or even back up. It didn't matter though, the progress bar kept an even pace and always finished at the exact instant the scan was done.
That has always stood out as one of the more impressive engineering feats I've seen.
It is such a difficult balance to be had since by taking a position of trying to resolve any/all frauds in the platform, they create a can of worm that is difficult, if not impossible to fill. The failure of finding all the frauds, illegal activity would prohibitively expensive, if not destructive to the platform itself (Think false-positives, etc).
For them, it is better/easier to say "we have the platform, we remove what we are legally bound to remove, everything else is on the user to be mindful of".
