Ive been running a home lab for awhile and its gotten pretty sophisticated over the years. About to destroy and rebuild. As such I want to document things and plan it all out nicely (I’ve been inspired by posts here!)
My problem is most likely my usage of a Mac these days. Visio doesnt work on the mac in a thick client, and the web client is pretty cool, but it’s quite confining in terms of shapes. Curious what you guys are using with the logo’ed graphics for every vendor/brand etc. Ideally something free, but not opposed to paying for a quality service/software.
Thanks in advance!
I use the Draw.Io desktop app, not the web version for obvious reason.
Use to do it on Visio… But well Microsoft destroyed it.
draw.io. you can save directly to google drive as well.
MS Paint
Excalidraw, Open source, easy to use and no paywall. You can export your files and save them locally as well.
I use Excalidraw or MermaidJS
We use Lucid Draw. Great because it is web based and can be used on any platform
I don’t know what it looks like until it’s done. 😆
I like D2 because it is declarative and I can keep the model in source control.
Yeah, this. I’m a big fan of the “diagrams as code” things like d2, mermaid, plantuml, nomnoml and all that. Obsidian has render plugins too so you can easily visualize things.
Lucidchart
draw.io. Not sure if there is a mac version (I’m running it on linux) but in any case there is a web version in which you can save (an load) your files locally.
Github supports mermaid to generate flowcharts, I keep meaning to take a deeper look at it and learn it.
Technically you can get a web browser version of vision but I’ve used lucidchart and draw.io before and they’re good. Lucid has good Visio compatibility, draw not so much
I use plantUML. Its alright, gets you the first 95% of the way there very quickly but the last 5% of formatting is just impossible
Lucid Chart