Alternative To Microsoft Visio For Mac

02.04.2020by

Talk about diagramming tools, and one of the first names that pop into your head is Microsoft Visio. With a plethora of templates, shapes, layouts, and designs, Visio is a paradise for your visual modeling requirements.

However, unless you are working in an MNC or a part of a massive team, the price tag of $280 for Standard version or as low as $5 per user monthly might make it a bit costlier for folks on a tight budget.

So, if you are seeking free alternatives to Microsoft Visio, don't worry, we have got you sorted. The following list of diagramming software and tools will help you choose the right one.

Visio alternative free download - The Alternative, Microsoft Visio Premium 2010, Microsoft Office Visio Standard, and many more programs. 10 Best Visio Alternatives For Mac 2019 1. SmartDraw is easily the most powerful yet easy to use alternative to Microsoft Visio. OmniGraffle Pro. If online apps are not your thing, OmniGraffle is the closest thing. Lucidchart is a powerful online diagramming. Edraw is a popular Visio alternative for making network diagram and other drawings on Mac system. It's easy to find networkdiagramVisioalternatives forWindows,butit's hard to find similar products for Mac.

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1. Lucidchart

Lucidchart advertises itself as a Visio alternative and boasts of being used by the teams at Cisco, Harvard University, Accenture, and more. From floor plans to Android mockups, it has a ton of robust pre-made templates.

Apart from that, this online tool is extremely easy to use. It allows you to add different shapes, containers, and smart connectors to make visually appealing designs. Plus, the shapes and containers change as per the type of diagram. On top of that, there are a slew of shapes and layering options to choose from.

The free version of Lucidchart is limited to three active documents per user. If you are mainly looking for personal use, the free templates and shapes should be sufficient. However, if you are not satisfied, you can upgrade to any of the paid versions.

The basic paid plan of Lucidchart is priced at $4 per month and it lets you use unlimited shapes and documents. Meanwhile, the Pro user plan is priced at $10 per month with the option to import or export Visio files. If you have a small team that often collaborates on designs, the Pro plan for teams is a bit heftily priced at $20 per month.

Why Lucidchart

  • Ridiculously easy to learn and use
  • Huge library of templates and shapes
  • Drag and drop
  • Integrations
Go to Lucidchart

2. Creately

Creately is another powerful online tool hiding many templates behind a simple interface. Available across multiple platforms, Creately believes in keeping things simple. It has an intuitive interface with a bunch of free templates and shapes. Unlike Lucidchart, this tool supports a variety of 'fun' templates that you can use to make community banners or for your school projects.

Unlike LucidCraft, this tool supports a variety of 'fun' templates.

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Other than that, there's a tiny contextual toolbar that shows up as soon as you select an object. With tools like quick connectors, text box creation, and external links, it makes the process faster and quicker.

On the collaboration front, you can work with your team members just by adding their email IDs. The free version lets you add up to three collaborators. Quite naturally, this restriction is removable if you upgrade to the paid versions.

Like any other diagramming tool, Creately limits some of the features like Visio files import and SVG export in the free plan. The personal plan starts at $5 per month and goes up to $125 for team plans.

Why Creately

Visio For Macintosh

  • Tons of templates
  • One-click contextual toolbar
  • Ready-made color palettes
  • Let's you import images from the web
Go to Creately

3. Pencil Project

The beauty of Pencil Project lies in the fact that it's free desktop software. For an open source project, Pencil has a pretty clean interface with all the necessary tools. It allows you to create mockups for almost everything mobiles, web pages, and even conventional flowcharts and diagrams.

The controls are quite straightforward. Double click to rotate the elements and single click to resize them. If I were to compare it to the above tools, I'd say that the icons may not be as sharp or colorful. However, those are some of the trade-offs if you are looking for a completely free diagramming tool.

As far as the templates are concerned, the options are limited to creating wireframes, GUI, and flowcharts. You won't find any fancy templates for infographics, family tree or network diagram. Export options include SVG, ODT, PDF, PNG or standard web page.

Why Pencil Project

  • Free and standalone software
  • Clean interface with simple tools
  • Cool collection of mobile GUI elements for smartphone mockups
Download Pencil Project

4. Draw.io

Draw.io is an utter delight of a diagramming tool. From standard charts and flowcharts to entity relationship diagrams and UML diagrams, you can play with a lot of templates in this online tool.

The best thing is that you don't even need to register. Simply open the site, select the templates and start working. Draw.io also lets you connect to Google Drive, Dropbox, OneDrive and even Github to export your templates. Similar to Pencil Project, you can export your projects in PNG, SVG, PDF, XML, and a few other formats. Plus, it also supports embedded URLs.

Draw.io redefines simplicity as it's incredibly easy to use. All you have to do is click on an element and all the necessary formatting options like font, color, style are accessible through the menu on the right.

Also, the collection of shapes and objects are sufficient for a free version.

Why Draw.io

  • Super simple interface
  • Has the option to search for shapes
  • Good for small-scale work
Go to Draw.io

5. yEd Graph Editor

yEd Graph Editor might not be the most stylish Visio alternative, but trust me when I say that it has the right tools and elements to make your work seamless and easy.

Since it's also a desktop software, you won't find many ready-made templates. But let me tell you that it is by far one of the best free tools for creating charts, flowcharts, and diagrams of computer networks. Plus, working on this tool is relatively easy. Simply drag and drop the elements.

As for the export options, yEd allows you to save your diagrams in PDF, JPEG, PNG, SWF, and HTML formats.

Why yEd Graph Editor

Alternative To Microsoft Visio For Mac Download

  • Apt for flowcharts and network diagrams
  • Plenty of shapes, edge types, entity relation elements, etc.
Download yEd Graph Editor

6. XMind

If your diagrams involve more of mapping, then you should give XMind a try. The beauty of XMind is that you can create an entire visually appealing mind map just through keystrokes. Yes, you read that right.

This offline drawing tool supports a few handy keyboard shortcuts that let you create child elements, add text or skip to the next element.

The elements and shapes library is immense and is available on a click of a button, along with the formatting options like font, structure, color, etc.

XMind is the a open source project and hence free to use. My only gripe is that the trial version stamps the XMind watermark on the diagrams. And to remove that, you need to subscribe to the Zen version by paying $27.99 per six months.

Why XMind?

  • Great for mappings
  • Vast library of elements and shapes
Download XMind
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7. Gliffy

Gliffy is another good online alternative to Microsoft Visio. Gliffy has three different account options to choose from — Basic (Standard), Single, and Team account. The Single and Team account are paid versions while the Basic is free to use. Here, the catch is that all your diagrams are marked public. So, unless you are planning to make a>Go to Gliffy

8. Google Drawings

Last but not the least, we have Google Drawings. Like most of the Google apps and tools, we have the G-advantage here — it's free and it's relatively simple to use.

And unlike the free versions (of paid drawing apps) that limit shapes and templates, Google Drawings offers loads of features and options.

You can play with process diagrams or try your hand at relationship diagrams. The color schemes are customizable. Plus, you can also change the levels or areas of the diagrams as per your needs. Given that Google documents can be easily shared, collaboration is surprisingly easy on Drawings.

Why Google Drawings

  • Free and simple to use
  • Plenty of templates to choose from
  • Customizable colors and areas
  • Gets automatically saved
Go to Google Drawings
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Make Powerful Visualizations

They say that seeing is believing and rightly so. Be it a software process or a simple infographic, unless the data is visually appealing and easy to understand, the work one puts in such diagrams may go to waste. And at the same time, it should be easy for a user to make such diagrams without much hassles.

So, these were some of the free alternatives to Microsoft Visio. There are also some other programs like DIA, Open Office, and LibreOffice which you can try.

Read NextOffice 365 vs Open365: Can Open Source Finally Win You OverAlso See#Online tools for diagrams #flowcharts

Did You Know

Visio For Mac Free

It's estimated that people share more than 700 billion photos per year on Facebook.

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With our work lives speeding up towards more — more responsibilities, more people to manage, more time at the office — we get overloaded with information. Naturally, we can only read so much text every day to deeply understand the problem at hand. That’s why well-designed imagery has been on the rise in the last decade or so. And there is no more popular visual editor than Microsoft Visio.

Microsoft Visio makes it easy to produce all the diagrams and workflow visualizations your team requires. You can collaborate with other people in real time to create organizational charts, engineering designs, and floor plans, which could also adapt based on live data you have available.

The software is widely used by structural engineers, project managers, business analysts, and executives of all kinds. Unfortunately, there are two problems with it: Microsoft Visio for Mac is not officially available and, if it would be, its license costs well over $500.

So if you and your office work predominantly on macOS, what do you do? Luckily, a good Visio alternative for Mac does exist, even a few! And more impressively they are much cheaper than the original software.

What Is A Visio Equivalent For Mac?

While Visio sets the bar up high for any alternative on Windows, its long-time absence from macOS has resulted in some strong competition from smaller independent startups. Apps like MindNode, XMind, and iThoughtsX have largely captured what would be MS Visio for Mac market share.

For good reasons. All three apps provide mind-mapping features that aid the confident decision making. At the same time, each one is different enough that they can be used in combination, depending on the goals you have in mind.

Create mind maps with ease

Microsoft Visio Alternative For Mac

Sometimes you just want to put your thoughts down on (digital) paper. You don’t need complicated schemes and you’re not planning to present to the Board just yet. These are the times when you should fire up MindNode.

MindNode is a simple but delightful mind-mapping tool. It acts as the perfect Visio for Mac OS equivalent for everyday tasks, as it’s much more nimble at creating something quick.

Use the Quick Entry feature in your menu bar to put together images, words, links, and the connections between them, and MindNode’s Smart Layout will adjust your thoughts to become more readable and beautiful.

When you’re done, swiftly send the resulting file as a text outline to print or another more advanced app that will perfect what you’ve started. Just remember that MindNode excels at visualizing your initial ideas and doesn’t pretend to be an all-in-one tool.

Plan your work at scale

Working with teams tends to get exponentially complicated. While three can do a stand-up meeting to catch up, seven need some sort of a written process in place, and ten or more would certainly benefit from a dedicated project manager, whose job is in part to design effective workflows for the company.

XMind is your project manager’s best friend. The app not only allows you to create mind maps of any complexity, it also lets you transform them into Gantt charts to clearly display the resources each task would require and its timeline. Finally, with a quick glance, you can see where your team is overcommitting and where they could pick up the slack.

Good news is you don’t even have to design something from scratch. A wide variety of templates for every business function makes XMind an essential Visio alternative for Mac that gets you up and running in no time.

In addition, XMind makes it effortless to present your plan to upper management, as the app features more than 60,000 icons to help you design outstanding maps and charts, and then turn them into slide-based presentations, perfectly fitting for any audience.

Gain complete control over visualizations

If your team is used to constantly stretch the possibilities of Visio, working with all of its features in some capacity, or even when you just need to up your game once in a while, a true Visio Mac alternative might be necessary. Look no further than iThoughtsX.

iThoughtsX enables you and your team to organize ideas, create task lists, brainstorm, plan ahead, set goals, write down meeting notes, and much more. No concept is too grand for iThoughtsX, which makes it a perfect Visio for Mac OS app choice.

It’s easy to integrate iThoughtsX into your team’s workflow, as it lets you import files from all other popular visualization apps such as XMind, ConceptDraw, Scrivener, Excel, and all types of text including Markdown. More importantly, it also lets you export to widely used Microsoft software like PowerPoint, Word, and Project, as well as PDF, PNG, and HTML.

Your team will immediately love iThoughtsX because of how well this Visio Mac alternative plays with the operating system. It features instant cloud synchronization via iCloud or Dropbox, can be edited simultaneously on Mac and iPhone, and looks gorgeous on retina screens.

The best Microsoft Visio for Mac you need

Microsoft Visio For Mac Os

Even given the three popular options of Visio alternative for Mac above, it’s a quite difficult choice. Think of it this way: MindNode is a perfect app to start your new idea, get it out of your head, and maybe show someone on your team. XMind is a robust planning tool that can take on a complete organization of your team’s processes, from brainstorming as a group to allocating time and resources. Finally, iThoughtsX is king of all, a true Visio equivalent for Mac that could match it on every level and then add some. It’s a heavy-hitter and should be used in that way, when you really need that extra power.

Alternative To Microsoft Visio For Mac Torrent

Best of all, MindNode, XMind, and iThoughtsX are available for a free trial through Setapp, a platform of more than 150 Mac apps and tools that are created to solve specific business problems across all categories. Look through its catalog now and shave off inefficiencies from your processes in no time!

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