[Hidden-tech] Visio alternatives?

[Jonathan Dill]

Hi folks,

I finally found a cross-platform application which seems comparable to 
Visio:

http://www.thekompany.com/products/kivio/index.php3

Kivio MP is non-free, but still cheaper than MS Visio ($99.95 CD or 
$89.95 download vs. $199.99 list for Visio Standard) and the additional 
stencils sets are much cheaper as well (typically $5-10).  If you have 
Linux, you can use the plain "Kivio" which is the free KOffice 
component, but comes with a few less bells and whistles and fewer stencils.

Dia is a free program for Linux which also has some network-related 
graphics included with it, but is less sophisticated.

http://www.gnome.org/projects/dia/

I have also seen some discussions of efforts to port Dia stencils to OOo 
draw, but haven't found any downloads for them.

For Windows, there is another non-free application called SmartDraw 
which seems pretty good, price comparable to Visio Standard ($197 for 
single user):

http://www.smartdraw.com/exp/ste/home/

Inkscape and Xara Xtreme also look impressive, but don't include any 
network-related graphics, nor was I able to find many ready-made.  It 
would take some work to build up a library of suitable graphics.  
Inkscape uses SVG format natively and has a built-in context-sensitive 
editor to modify the SVG XML source.  Xara uses .xar format, which 
claims to be more powerful than SVG, but .xar is not an open standard 
and needs to be exported to some other format for inclusion in other 
documents.

http://www.inkscape.org/
http://www.xaraxtreme.org/

Jonathan