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I use yEd for drawing this kind of thing. It allows me to make a horribble mess of boxes and arrows, then auto-cleans it up with a few clicks in the menu.

It requires making sone compromises, however: Box inside box does not always end well. It is a worthy tradeoff for me, as I can document things much faster, and you get a feel about what will or wont work after a few tries.




Is yEd free to use? The underlying yWorks SDK seems to cost 5 figures for one developer working on one web site. It must be very capable to have customers for ~20 years.


Their page states it is freely available. I cant seem to find the license on their website, unfortunately. I believe it started out as a demo for their paid library, but turned out to be a good standalone application.

https://www.yworks.com/products/yed


Yes, yEd is free to use. The licensing cost you found is indeed for the SDK yEd is built with.


ditto. There's no reason to draw anything.

Extract relations as tgf (trivial graph format), import, hierarchical layout.

tgf:

    from, to, relation
    ...


I use OmniGraffle for similar reasons :)




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