So recently our team need to deliver some feature, the feature is quietly simple and easy to understand. But I have issue with how I should tell my teams how it works, because we working far apart and some of our teams do all the work at home.

The first things that come to my mind is how to make it simpler to understand without call all of them here to the HQ offline? then the miracle happens.

suddenly I read something about making diagram and in one time i got 2 tools that can make a cool diagram. Remember it’s not just a diagram but the cool one, the tools is app.drgm.net and excalidraw.com

and here is the recap of that’s two tools

app.dgrm.net

so we start with the serious diagram tools. It’s easy to use, really straight forward and you can make a flow chart easly. And it’s keep getting better with auto focus export image so you dont need to adjust it by your self

The Pro

• it’s open source
• you can use it online at official site or self hosted
• the design is so fluid especially at arrowing

The Meh..

• still have room to improve several things
• text positioning sometimes messed up
• only support flowchart for now

excalidraw.com

Now the excalidraw, have different way to create a diagram. First time use this tools it feels like use comic sans ms instead of calibri or times new roman when writing a post mortem which is not wrong but not good either.

But all i can say it’s have it’s own styling which so simple and relaxing. It’s also feels like “hey if you nerd you can use this tools”. They even have a feature called “nerd statistics” like how dare you excalidraw!, but it’s cool though.

Excalidraw also very rich of feature like it’s able to do image uploading, have some kind of library that provide you with some assets and many more!

The Pro

• it’s also open source
• really living it’s motto : Online whiteboard collaboration made easy (alternative for jam board? psps: check the pro subs)
• really build for nerd
• support real time team working (like the one at figma, one figma can be accessed and edited in one time by many people)
• great community

The Meh..

• it’s support private library but somehow only able to be accesed via one workstation
• it’s really rich of feature but only for paid users (Actually make sense tho)
• the text management can be better

Conclusion

I need to learn about how to explain something better to my team instead of looking for execuse and start to looking for more tools (but i’am lazy sometimes, so here it is). But the both tools is great, it depends on what your need. As always wisdom old people said, if you need more feature just fork it and built it by your self.

But personally the excalidraw is very outstanding and cool, and it’s more famous than app.drgm.net so it make sense.